Education Partner: Pharos Tutors

Pharos Tutors offers short topic-based online courses on a variety of family history and genealogy-related subjects.

Topics range from genealogical sources, such as wills and Chancery records, to courses on one-name and one-place studies, Scottish and Irish research, DNA and the popular “Professional Genealogist” course. We also have a number of courses that incorporate family history with local and community history, such as:

Our tutors are professional genealogists, archives professionals, historians and subject experts and have often written books on the subjects they teach. We have around twenty tutors and over forty courses, with more courses in development.

Our Tutor-led courses are our most popular and usually last between 3 and 6 weeks. The format of each is the same. Students are delivered lesson notes at the start of each week. These are in pdf format so that they can be downloaded and kept forever. Each lesson contains activities for students to complete and these are posted in the online course forum area. Students can see each other’s work, comment and collaborate where appropriate. Every week the students have the opportunity to attend a weekly online tutorial session with their tutor and fellow students. This is great opportunity for students to ask their tutor questions.

We have two Family History Skills and Strategies certificate programmes, which are combinations of Tutor-led courses, but with the added benefit of formal assessment. These were developed in partnership with the Society of Genealogists, and our Advanced Certificate is recognised by AGRA (the Association of Genealogists and Researchers in Archives) as a route to professional genealogy.

BALH / Pharos Tutors local history courses

BALH, in collaboration with our Education Partner Pharos Tutors, have created new two four-week courses:

Getting Started with Local History is aimed at any local historian looking for inspiration and advice though it will especially appeal to those of you who have recently started or would like to start researching local history. It will introduce you to local history as a subject and discusses key skills and sources to help you with your research. The focus will be on modern British history from c.1780 to the present day.

Progressing your Local History Research is for any local historian looking for inspiration and advice though it will especially appeal to those who have already begun their research. The course builds upon the themes, skills and records considered in the Getting Started with Local History course, developing research skills and moving to the period before the Industrial Revolution to records less familiar to the local or family historian. We then move onto bringing the pieces of your research together for analysis, selecting appropriate analysis techniques and thinking about how to share your findings.

The course tutor is Joe Saunders. With a long-standing passion for local history, Joe is proud to be a Trustee of BALH. Read his blog post: Why do Local History? Joe has undergraduate and masters degrees in history from the University of Glasgow. Currently, he is a part-time PhD researcher at the University of York where he also teaches seminars. Joe presents regularly at academic conferences and writes for academic publications.