Stop Looking at Historic Maps Like a Modern Tourist
Using historic maps to discover the sights, sounds, and routines of everyday life.
I love maps. Love, love, love, love, love them. I have never met a map I didn’t adore. I’m not saying it’s a healthy relationship obsession, but I’m okay with that. Here’s why.
A map doesn’t just show us where someone lived. It tells us a story about what it was like to live there.
One of the first things many family historians do when researching an ancestor is to find their address. This can be done in a variety of ways, and many of the major national collections in the UK now come with associated maps, like the 1921 Census of England and Wales and the 1939 Register.
We locate the house on a map. We likely save it to our files, maybe even add a little colored marker or line to indicate the property. We zoom in.
We feel good about that, and we should. We found them! It’s definitely a win.
But the address is just the beginning. Our ancestors didn’t just occupy a location. They lived in a world full of movement, noise, smells, routines, relationships, and change.
So how do we extract the story from these 2-dimensional maps and make them sing with detail? We use our senses, a bit of imagination, and we try to picture their reality.
What did they hear?
Historic maps are often much noisier than we realize. When you find your ancestor’s home, don’t only look at the street name. Look at everything around it.
Was there a railway line nearby?
A factory?
A dockyard?
A market?
A church?
A school?
Those places weren’t just landmarks. They were part of the soundtrack of everyday life.
A family living beside a railway experienced more than convenient transport. They heard engines, whistles, passengers, goods being moved, and the rhythm of arrivals and departures.
Someone living near a church didn’t just see a steeple on the skyline. They heard bells marking time, celebrations, and moments of community significance.
Industrial buildings weren’t simply labels printed on a map. They represented machinery, workers, deliveries, and the sounds of labour happening around them every day.
And I bet you are hearing a train or a playground full of children in your own head right now, aren’t you? That’s good, that’s what we want.
What did they smell?
What did the past smell like? You may already be thinking of crowded streets with human and animal waste running alongside. It’s a powerful image… but it’s not the only one we should hold onto.
Look again at the area surrounding your ancestor’s home.
Was there a brewery nearby?
A tannery?
A livestock market?
A factory?
A river?
A farm?
A dock?
Those features shaped daily experience. Someone living near a tannery or industrial works experienced a very different environment than someone living beside open fields. Someone near a harbour lived among the smells of water, ships, cargo, animals, and industry.
How did the odors of the area impact how they lived? How they stored food, where they hung their wash, or which way they walked to church? Or did it impact those details at all?
What did they see?
Imagine your ancestor opening their front door. What was in front of them?
A narrow street… maybe row houses. Possibly shop windows along a High Street, or maybe they couldn’t see far at all. Were they up on a hill, so had a view of the city skyline… or up on a hill and had a view of the valley below, crops, sheep, or a canal? Could they see factory chimneys, a crowded marketplace? If you don’t know already, learn how to read a topographic map to even determine if they were on that hill or not.
The landscape around a home shaped how people understood their community. And you are already know where this is going…
A child growing up surrounded by mills and terraces experienced a very different childhood from one surrounded by farmland.
A person living in a rapidly expanding town watched the landscape change around them.
The view from the doorstep was the background to everyday life.
Where did they walk?
Maps also help us understand movement. I think about this one a lot, mostly because I live in Colorado and we have a lot of elevation change here. But even in “flat” areas, the landscape influences our decisions.
Our ancestors didn’t experience their communities from above, looking down like we do on a map, of course. They walked. A lot.
So trace their journeys.
How far was it to work?
Could children walk to school?
Where was the nearest church or chapel?
How close were parents, siblings, or extended family?
Where did they shop?
Where did they gather?
Those repeated journeys created familiarity, relationships, and community. And realize, of course, what isn’t on the map: the trails and shortcuts, the well-known path between two buildings, the alley they can cut through to shave a couple of minutes off that walk. For this, I would encourage you to obtain many, many maps of the same area (see next section).
What changed around them?
One of the most powerful things we can do is compare maps across time. Places change as humanity makes its impact. Our ancestors witnessed a lot of those changes.
What buildings came down when the rail came in? Alternatively, what buildings remained when the rail came in (and why)? Did fields give over to cottages or streets? Military encampments? Did forests become national preserved lands?
What industries made an impact with factories and employee housing? Have you consulted a geologic map to understand the minerals and resources available in that area?
The arrival of a railway wasn’t just a transportation milestone. It changed what people heard, where they could work, how quickly news travelled, and how connected they felt to the wider world.
And don’t forget about ancestors who move around… one of my favorite maps ever is the pilot charts of the North Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Designed for vessels and their crews, they tell us an awful lot about the experience our ancestors had moving around the world, in the exact month that movement took place. (Look at all that text!)
Rebuilding Their World
Maps are so much more than just an address. They represent discovery and can be a truly powerful tool in our arsenal. As we all work to understand the true complexities of our ancestors, these maps tell us a story. And we should all be scrambling for as many variations on the theme as we can find.
Maps are roads and buildings. But they are also noise, movement, work, community, change, technology, and even a parade route here and there.
So the next time you find an address, don’t stop after you find the house. Look around.
Ask what they heard.
Ask what they smelled.
Ask what they saw.
Ask where they walked.
Because the goal isn’t simply to find where your ancestors lived, it’s to understand the world they called home.
As always, I would love to hear your thoughts. What maps do you adore?
A quick note on transparency: I work for Findmypast, so you’ll often see me reference records, tools, and collections available there. These are not affiliate links, and I don’t receive commission. They’re simply resources I use regularly in my own research.
Merthyr Tydfil Map image: 1868-1875 Ordnance Survey, National Library of Scotland. https://maps.nls.uk/view/102342433#zoom=7.3&lat=8780&lon=3123&layers=BT
I share your obsession with historical maps - there have been research days when I've done nothing but explore map after map after map. My hard drive has many, many many downloads.
Your post sums up perfectly every reason I use them. The next time I do my Maps presentation, I'll include a link to this post in my Resources list 😊
Excellent post. I use historical Ordnance Survey maps of Britain from the early 20th century when researching my 1920s-set murder mystery novels. They are endlessly fascinating, not least the level of detail - you can see churches, pubs, factories and railway lines, police stations (handy for my line of work) as well as get inspiration from the street names. I love the idea of noting down everything you could hear from a particular location. There's clearly a big cross-over between writing historical fiction and researching family ancestry.