Place:Old Shoreham, Sussex, England

Old Shoreham was a civil parish until 1933 when it joined the urban district of Shoreham by Sea which had been built up from the neighbouring parish of New Shoreham since 1910. The local relationships are best described in British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex: Volume 6, Part 1. The first chapter on Old and New Shoreham explains the physical and political geography of the area and includes a map with the boundaries of each of the original parishes.

The village of Old Shoreham was on the bank of the River Adur at the foot of the South Downs and its church dates back to Anglo-Saxon times. Old Shoreham was an agrarian village. The ownership of the manors of Old Shoreham are discussed in the second chapter on Shoreham in A History of the County of Sussex: Volume 6, Part 1 and its economic history in the third.

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 on Old Shoreham
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex: Volume 6, Part 1, Bramber Rape: Southern Part, the first of a number of chapters on New Shoreham (Shoreham by Sea) and Old Shoreham