Place:Oving, Sussex, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

Oving is a civil parish in West Sussex, lying on the coastal plain immediately to the east of Chichester. It is bounded on the north and west sides by the A27 trunk road. The A259 Chichester-Bognor road traverses the southern part of the parish.

The parish had a population of 1,022 in the 2001 UK Census, increasing to 1,051 at the 2011 census. Half the population lives in Oving village, the rest in the smaller settlements of Colworth, Drayton, Shopwhyke, and Merston (which was a separate parish until 1933).

The landscape is flat and is given over mainly to agriculture with some growing of salad crops close to the A259. The landscape of the western part of the parish at Drayton and Shopwhyke has been affected by gravel extraction, which has left a number of lakes that are inaccessible to the public. (These are marked on Google Earth.)

The parish church is dedicated to St. Andrew and dates from the 13th century.

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).

"OVING, a village and a parish in Westhampnett [registration] district, Sussex. The village stands near the South Coast railway, ¾ of a mile N E by E of Drayton [railway] station, and 2½ E of Chichester; and has a post-office under Chichester. The parish contains the tythings of Colworth and Portfield, and comprises 2,946 acres. Real property: £7,472. Population in 1851: 876; in 1861: 949. Houses: 206. Shopwyke House, a beautiful mansion, belongs to the Rev. G. H. Woods. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Chichester. Value: £352. Patron: the Bishop of Chichester. The church is early English; was restored in 1841; and consists of nave and transepts, with E tower and spire."

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.

• [https://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/SSX/Oving GENUKI on Oving
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex: Volume 4, the Rape of Chichester, section on Oving
• Maps of the local area are to be found on pages for Box and Stockbridge Hundred and Chichester Rape.