Find your ancestors in Sussex Family History Group

Sussex Family History Group

The Sussex Family History Group (SFHG), founded in 1972, is the family history society that covers all of Sussex – the two administrative counties of East and West Sussex as well as the city of Brighton and Hove. There are around 3,500 members worldwide. The SFHG is a registered charity and its aims include ‘promoting the study of genealogy and family history and encouraging the preservation, transcription and publication of relevant documents and records’.

There are five meeting centres: at Brighton and Hove, Chichester, Horsham, Uckfield and Worthing, that hold monthly meetings, which are open to visitors, with talks and occasional visits. An annual conference is held in the spring and the society organises and attends family history fairs and local events.

The society has its Family History Research Centre and Library at The Keep, Falmer, Brighton, which is manned by volunteers to assist people with their research, and is open several days each week. The Keep is home to the East Sussex Record Office, the Brighton History Centre and other archives as well as SFHG.

Members receive a handbook and a quarterly journal, the Sussex Family Historian, as part of their subscription. This journal is full of articles and information about Sussex and family history research and includes the latest members’ surname interests and other relevant and topical information. Members also have unlimited use of the online “SFHG Data Archive” with access to Sussex family history information and transcriptions available on the SFHG website. The society hosts a Facebook ’closed’ group with more than 1300 members and runs a Rootsweb email forum (sfhg members only).

The SFHG has produced indexes and databases of Sussex information, including parish records (baptisms, marriages and burials), census returns, monumental inscriptions, wills, strays, members’ surname interests and a ‘Sussex People Index’. Much of this data is in an online archive with free access by SFHG members.

A recent innovation is the ‘SFHG MyTree’ database, which allows ‘supervised’ searching by surname of members’ family trees to identify possible matches and to link members who are researching the same surnames. ‘SFHG MyTree’ also provides a secure off-site backup for members’ valuable research and can include scans of photos, certificates, video and sound.

The Group also has a very successful publications operation, including individual CDs, transcriptions of all West Sussex parish registers, an index of all Sussex marriages prior to 1837 and also memorial inscriptions from many churches. A series of CDs also features transcriptions of Poor Law, Quarter Sessions, Settlement and Removal orders and other parish records etc. for Sussex. These and other publications of interest are listed on the SFHG website and available at family history shows.

If you would like to join this forward-looking, friendly group, please find out more and join via the website.

Here on Findmypast, you can explore Sussex Burials provided by the Sussex Family History Group.*

*These records are available as part of a Findmypast Plus and Pro subscription.