Place:Warminghurst, Sussex, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

Warminghurst is a tiny village and former civil parish in the Horsham District of West Sussex, England, England. It lies on the Ashington to Heath Common road 2.4 miles (3.9 km) northeast of Storrington. The parish of Warminghurst was absorbed into the parish of Thakeham in 1933.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Warminghurst's Anglican church, was declared redundant in 1979. The 13th-century Grade I-listed building is now cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust.

In 1676 Henry Bigland sold Warminghurst Manor to William Penn. Using this house, the Penn family were able to hold secret monthly meetings for Quakers from the local Horsham district and when Penn left England in 1682 for his first visit to America, he had many of these local Quakers join him. In 1707 he sold the house to James Butler who had it demolished and then erected another on the site, which was then subsequently demolished by the Duke of Norfolk in 1806. The large barn and farm buildings which survive today behind Park Lane likely do not date from Penn's house but from the early 18th century mansion of James Butler.

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 Warminghurst
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex: Volume 6, Part 2, Bramber Rape: North-western Part, first of a number of chapters on Warminghurst
• Maps of the local area are to be found on the page for Arundel Rape and on that for Thakeham Rural District.
• Wikipedia has a map of the old parish of Warminghurst which will expand to show the breakdown of land ownership within the parish.