Place:Ashington, Sussex, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

Ashington is a village and civil parish in the Horsham District of West Sussex, England. It lies on the A24 road 3 miles (4.8 km) northeast of Storrington.

The parish has a land area of 805 hectares (1,989 acres or 3.11 sq mi). In the 2001 UK census 2,351 people lived in 905 households. In 2011 UK Census population had increased to 2,526.

The ancient Anglican parish church is dedicated to St Peter and St Paul.

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).

"ASHINGTON, a parish in Thakeham [registration] district, Sussex; 4 miles NW of Steyning, and 5 ESE of Pulborough [railway] station. It has a post office under Hurstperpoint; contains the hamlet of Bunckton [Buncton]; and has fairs on 29 June and 21 July. Acres: 1,273. Real property: £1,509. Population: 234. Houses: 52. The property is subdivided. The parish is noted for coursing. The living is a rectory united with the curacy of Bunckton, in the diocese of Chichester. Value: £288. Patron: the Duke of Norfolk. The church is good."

Parish border alterations

Buncton, described by Wilson in his Gazetteer, existed as a settlement at the time of the Domesday Book of 1086, when it was called "Bongetune". Its origins lie in a manor whose land lay "within two exclaves [detached portions] of the parish of Ashington within the Rape of Bramber". The medieval manor house has vanished, but a 17th-century replacement still stands. The two detached portions of Ashington were transferred to the parish of Wiston in 1891. (Buncton has been redirected to Wiston.)

In 1933 and in 1960 various other alterations were made to the borders of Ashington. The largest of these was the absorbtion of the parish of Warminghurst in 1933. The borders with Thakeham, Washington and Wiston were also effected by these changes. (Source: A Vision of Britain through Time)

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 Ashington
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex: Volume 6, Part 2, Bramber Rape: North-western Part, the first of a number of chapters on Ashington
• Maps of the local area are to be found on the page for Arundel Rape and on that for Thakeham Rural District.