Hurst History Study Group / Mid Sussex Roots

At last I am back online and looking forward to new interaction with all you members (and non-members if anybody is interested in our work).

In the last 4 weeks I have resettled in the UK and will ultimately find a home in the Haywards Heath area.

My car accident in February 2007 in Twineham has taken its toll on my health but I am now making rapid progress.

Before we embark on more new research I feel we have to consolidate and that our priorities should be:

1.    to finish the transcribing and proof-reading of the Borrer Diary where we are only a few frustrating chapters from completion. It is not the easiest writing to decipher and his writing varies over the years.
Nevertheless it is an important document as it gives a   different view to the conventional history book. If we do not complete our task we lose an important contribution.

Now all we need are volunteers. You, you and you!

2.    We have promised the West Sussex Library that        we will help reconstruct three short books  about
       Sussex. Most of the work is already done. All we           need is a dedicated person to finalise the text
       and insert the pictures provided.   

  Finally we need one or two proofreaders. In all this    project is our easiest.

3.     We have a couple of very short diaries already      transcribed and describing our ancestors leaving  Sussex for Australia. All we need here are a couple of historians who can research the reasons for their leaving Sussex and their life afterwards – if possible making family links up to the present day. A fairly easy task.

4.    The first diary we transcribed was that of our

    18th Century forbear, Thomas Marchant, some        years ago.  Some research has already been done      and integrated in italics into the diary itself.   

However there is a lot more important data to

    research and annotate. This job just demands

    tenacity and will be fun for the lucky volunteer.

I have certainly omitted some jobs here but will publish them to the website shortly.

Enjoy the rest of the UK Summer / New World Winter

 JIMMY PARKINSON

1920-2007

Hurst History Study Group members have recently lost a valued friend and colleague, who died after a short spell in hospital following a fall which caused a fracture of his left femur.

Jimmy was born in Blackburn, the son of a qualified pharmacist. After school in Blackburn and Sheffield he tried to join the Royal Air Force before the start of World War II, but was rejected for poor eyesight. So he enrolled for the pharmacy degree course at Nottingham University, but interrupted his studies to join the army in September 1942. After officer training at Aldershot, he saw service with the Lancashire Fusiliers and the Parachute Regiment in Italy, southern France, Greece and Palestine, before returning to Nottingham in 1947 and graduating the following year.

His further career was in teaching, first at the School of Pharmacy in London, where research resulted in a Ph.D., and later in Brighton. Here he was appointed successively Head of the School of Pharmacy, Principal of Brighton Technical College, and eventually Deputy Director of the Polytechnic (later Brighton University), with an interval as Deputy Secretary of the Pharmaceutical Society in London. During this period, he also read for the law, eating his dinners at Middle Temple.

He never lost his love of the army or parachuting and spent many years with the Territorial Army, retiring in 1963 from the post of GSO(II) with the rank of Major, having qualified for the Territorial Decoration and been awarded the MBE (Mil).

But it is for his active involvement in the life of Hurstpierpoint, particularly the Church as Secretary of the PCC and later as a member the General Synod, that we remember him. When thoughts turned to researching the history of the parish, it was natural that Jimmy would become involved. In particular he and Bunty investigated the history of the shops in the village, contributing a valuable chapter in Hurstpierpoint – kind and charitable. At the meetings of HHSG he could always be relied upon for words of wisdom, cutting through much verbiage from the rest of the Group to bring us to the central problem and so to an agreed solution with the minimum of words – in his reassuring northern tones of course.

NEWSLETTER

The past few months have been quiet on the Family History front although many of you have made valuable contributions to our Family Tree which has expanded considerably since the beginning of the year.

You will find the usual downloadable gedcom on the MSR website. It is unfortunately wrongly titled as being the January 2007 version. In fact it is the October version and much bigger than in January.

A few of you are in ongoing email contact with me and I owe some of you responses which I will try to deal with soon. I am still dogged by ill-health (rehab and treatment taking up most of my time) and will be in Rome for 14 days from the 10^th of the month studying Italian and bonding with my eldest son, our webmaster Simon.

Expect a bit more activity in November.