Family location

I live in Lancashire. I started researching my paternal family history abot 10 years ago. My brother and his wife lived in London and were aware of what I was doing but had no knowledge of what I had found - that partly being that our mid 1800's ancestors lived in Hastings, Sussex before returning to London around 1890. My brother/sister-in-law decided to buy a little place for weekends in the mutually agreed area of Bognor Regis. They started off to look at property there but stopped in Hastings for lunch on the way. They looked in an estate agent's window, saw a little house for sale, went to see it on the spur of the moment, put an offer in straight away and bought it. On hearing this I was delighted because I thought they were in a great position to do some family research for me in the local library etc. Some time later I got in touch and asked them to go look at an address where an ancestor had been born if they had time and knew where it was - that was when they became interested in what I was doing because the "address" was only a couple of doors away from their house, the original house no longer there but the foundations still standing. From there we eventually learnt that the little house that they had bought had in fact been built in what had been the garden of another ancestor, his house still standing. It was quite weird sitting on their patio this summer looking straight onto the rear of a house that once belonged to part of our family. That particular part of the family had been quite wealthy and big property owners in the Hastings area - the only other property that they owned outside the area was a property related to their dealings with cattle breeding - it was in Wellingborough, Northants, by the park gates. I was born in Wellingborugh and my grandfather used to take me daily through the gates when he took me to see the swans in the park when I was very young.