Place:Yapton, Sussex, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

Yapton is a village and civil parish in the Arun District of West Sussex, England. It is centred three miles (4.8 km) northeast of Bognor Regis at the intersection of the B2132 and B2233 roads.

The parish of Yapton lies on the coastal plain southwest of Arundel, between the South Downs and the English Channel. St Mary the Virgin parish church, 13th century or earlier in origin, is in the centre of the village. It houses a twelfth-century font.

Other settlements in the parish include Bilsham and Flansham. Bilsham Chapel is a deconsecrated former chapel of ease to St Mary the Virgin Church; it dates from the 13th–14th century but fell out of use in the mid-16th century.

The disused Portsmouth and Arundel Canal which linked nearby the River Arun to Chichester Harbour, runs through the village. This was built in the early 19th century primarily on the hope that it would be a safe inland shipping route between London and Portsmouth avoiding the then risk of attack in the English Channel by the French following the Napoleonic Wars. Throughout its lifetime, 1823-1855 - a time when the Wey and Arun Canal was open (1816-1871) - the route was used for transporting agricultural goods and munitions, for instance, from Chilworth, Hampshire and Hanworth, Middlesex gunpowder works and to and from the military docks on the lower Thames in the Royal Borough of Greenwich.

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 Yapton
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex: Volume 5, Part 1, Arundel Rape: South-Western Part, Including Arundel, section on Yapton
• Maps of the local area are to be found on pages for Avisford Hundred and Arundel Rape.