Kirsty Gray

Kirsty is a professional genealogist and ‘people finder’ who runs her own research company Family Wise Limited. As a freelance author, she has published articles in family, local and social history magazines and handbooks across the globe. She has been researching the story of her paternal West Country family for many years and, having realised in the late 1990s that her eccentric hobby was called a surname study, co-founded The Surname Society (registering the Sillifant surname) in 2014 to meet the needs of surname studiers in the 21st century. Kirsty published Tracing Your West Country Ancestors in 2013 and is a founder member and was initially Chair of the Society for One-Place Studies, an international society for family and local historians.

Although a relative youngster in the field of genealogy, Kirsty has been involved in family history for over two decades and has lectured on various stages from local to international, on land and at sea. Kirsty has been featured on Qui-Etes Vous? (Who Do You Think You Are?) in Canada, researching the English roots of the opera singer, Marc Hervieux and in 2016, one of Kirsty’s successful adoption stories of 2015 featured on the second series of the BBC’s Family Finders. Having traded in her day job as a schoolteacher to follow her passion, Kirsty is widely sought after as a family history tutor, lecturer and motivational speaker around the world.