Place:Kingston by Ferring, Sussex, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Kingston by Ferring is a small civil parish in the Arun District of West Sussex, England. It is a combination of a farmed rural interior and the three neighbourhoods of East Kingston, West Kingston and Kingston Gorse. The parish lies on the coast, between Ferring and East Preston parishes.

Kingston is three miles (5 km) to the west of Worthing and one of the most sparsely populated areas in the Brighton/Worthing/Littlehampton conurbation; there is road access from East Preston, but not from Ferring immediately to the east. A generally pedestrianised seafront connects the parish to Littlehampton and to Worthing.

The original village centre, including the parish church, was lost to the sea around 1630.

Kingston Gorse is a seaside neighbourhood south of East Kingston farm, centred 3.4 miles (5.6 km) east of Littlehampton. The one church in the parish is at Kingston Gorse.

The parish has an area of 1.72 km2 (0.66 sq mi) and the population in the UK census of 2011 was 625.

The following description from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72 is provided by the website A Vision of Britain Through Time (University of Portsmouth Department of Geography).

"KINGSTON, a parish in Worthing [registration] district, Sussex;, on the coast, 1½ mile SE of Angmering [railway] station, and 5 W of Worthing. Post town, Littlehampton, under Arundel. Acres: 582; of which 148 are water. Real property: £918. Population: 45. Houses: 9. A coast guard station is here. The living is a rectory, annexed to the vicarage of Ferring, in the diocese of Chichester. The church was washed away by the sea."

Research Tips

• The West Sussex Record Office is located in Chichester. Because it holds the records of the Church of England Diocese of Chichester, which covers the whole of Sussex, it has church records relating to both parts of Sussex.
• An on-line catalogue for some of the collections held by the West Sussex Record Office is available under the Access to Archives (A2A) project (a nationwide facility housed at The National Archives, Kew).
• West Sussex Past - database of 2 million records from West Sussex heritage organizations.
• The Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies' Sussex Collection (PDF). This is a 9-page PDF naming the files relating to Sussex in their collection-a possible first step in a course of research.
• The National Library of Scotland has a website which provides maps taken from the Ordnance Survey England & Wales One-Inch to the Mile series of 1892-1908 as well as equivalent maps for Scotland itself. The immediate presentation is a "help" screen and a place selection screen prompting the entry of a location down to town, village or parish level. These screens can be removed by a click of the "X". The map is very clear and shows parish and county boundaries and many large buildings and estates that existed at the turn of the 20th century. Magnification can be adjusted and an "overlay feature" allows inspection of the area today along with that of 1900. The specific map from the series can be viewed as a whole ("View this map") and this allows the inspection of the map legend (found in the left hand bottom corner. Becoming familiar with the various facilities of these maps is well worth the trouble.

• GENUKI omits it from its list of Sussex parishes.
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex does not cover the Poling Hundred.
• Maps of the local area are to be found on the page for Arundel Rape and on that for East Preston Rural District.