Littlington Church by Petrie (c) Sussex Archaeological Society |
A team of volunteers has been adding copies of those owned by the Society onto the website sussexpast.org.uk. If you look for sussexpast.org.uk/library you will soon see the helpful introductory page which tells you how to link in. Go to the on-line resources button.
So if your ancestor lived in a Sussex parish, there may be scans of the church as it looked when they were alive, baptised, married or buried unless they were non-conformists - Quakers or Presbyterians and preferred to have such events recorded in their registers.
Some of the drawings of the interiors of the churches also show how they looked in the 1700s and earlier 1800s when the service was based on the sermon, the altar was not significant and often out of the line of sight of the congregation and the better off owned or rented pews to sit in whilst the sermon was given. From the mid 1800s, the Victorians began to re-order the interiors of churches and change the services. The pulpit was moved to the side, box pews began to disappear, replaced by benches and the altar reinstated.
Look at the water colour of the inside of Litlington Church by Petrie in the Sharpe Collection and probably painted in 1804 (the date he wrote on his view of the exterior below). In the interior view (see above) the box pews and the pulpit dominate the church.
Littlington Church by Saunders 10 Sept 1860 |
Take a look at the site and see if your church is there - if not in these three collections then try the Nibbs churches which are also uploaded.
For information on the history of parish churches in Sussex see Sussex Parish Churches