Dear Reader,

We are delighted to announce the appointment of Dr Sophie Kay as a Pharos Tutor. 

Sophie is a professional genealogist based in Berkshire and specialises in maps, research methodology, genetic genealogy and historical occupations. Her own family history journey has taken in Lancashire textile workers, Cornish soldiers, Irish agricultural labourers, and Middlesex carpenters who built a lot of London pubs!

Sophie is an experienced educator and international speaker, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her previous teaching roles include College Lecturer at the University of Oxford, teaching mathematics, statistics and interdisciplinary bioscience, and Director of the Open Science Training Initiative, training professional scientists in research methodology. 

If you enjoy a good chat about all things family history, then you may have already met Sophie through Twitter's Ancestry Hour, where she is part of the behind-the-scenes team. She also tackles all manner of family history subjects on her blog, The Parchment Rustler.

Sophie is developing a brand new course for us, Mapping Strategies for Family Historians, which will run later this year (more below).

Mapping Strategies for Family Historians

Maps have the potential to transform the entire process of family history research. This four-week course will introduce you to three novel, practical mapping methods to support sound critical thinking and allow your genealogy research to flourish.

Students will develop the knowledge and technical skills required to use maps for decision making and contextual awareness in evidence-based family history, and as a means of guiding research planning. Applicable to a broad range of eras and places, the three mapping methods either use the bigger picture of an individuals behaviour over time to generate research leads, or use a single ancestral address to gain detailed insights into the experiences of an individual or family.

On completion of the course, students will be able to:

• Implement the Outlier Method, Ancestral Walks and Concentric Survey approaches digitally and on paper and understand their suitability for particular situations
• Employ mapping techniques to hone, direct and develop their genealogy research
• Generate specific searches within primary and secondary historical sources using mapping insights derived from an ancestors locality
• Critique the provenance and bias of historical maps
• Use a range of archival catalogues and collections to locate maps for use in their personal research.

Students will have the opportunity to work on their own family history for some of the exercises in the course.

Maps can be the gateway to valuable and fascinating insights about how our ancestors lived and why they made certain decisions. This course will give participants the confidence to bring maps to the heart of their research process to pursue those ancestral narratives further – and hopefully have tremendous fun along the way!

Click here to let us know you would like to be informed when booking opens for Mapping Strategies for Family Historians