Place:Patching, Sussex, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

Patching is a small village and civil parish that lies amid the fields and woods of the southern slopes of the South Downs in the National Park in the Arun District of West Sussex, England. It is centred four miles (6.4 km) to the east of Arundel and quarter of a mile from Clapham, to the north of the A27 road. The civil parish covers an area of 846.12 hectares (2,090.8 acres or 3.27 sq mi) and in the UK census of 2011 it had a population of 259.

In the centre of the village is the 13th century Church of St John the Divine, restored in 1888. Above the village on the South Downs are groups of neolithic flint mines, represented by slight hollows and mounds.

Michelgrove Park, once the site of a great house where Sir William Shelley (circa 1480–1549) entertained Henry VIII and later home of the Shelley Baronets, is in the north of the parish. It is crossed by the Monarch's Way long-distance footpath marking the supposed route of the flight of Charles II to France in 1651.

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 Patching
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex: Volume 6, Part 1, Bramber Rape: Southern Part, section on Patching
• Maps of the local area are to be found on the page for Arundel Rape and on that for East Preston Rural District.