When looking at faded old photographs of our ancestors, it’s easy to forget that they inhabited a world as full of sensory experiences as our own. Indeed, their lives might have buzzed with many sound, tastes, textures and smells which are now largely lost to us unless we make an effort to investigate them. The most overlooked of our ancestors’ experiences are probably the olfactory ones, and there may be a number of different clues to these among family papers or inherited items. Look for references to smells in family letters and diaries, include questions about smell in your oral history interviews of elderly relatives (see below) and contemplate the smell of inherited items such as old apple-presses, desks, snuffboxes, perfume bottles and clothing. From all the information you have about your ancestor you will probably be able to imagine what the smell-scape of his or her life might have been. And, a consideration of smell will not simply bring your ancestors’ lives more fully to life, it will also help you to understand something more about them – either about the part of the country from which they came, their religion, ethnicity, class, gender or occupation.

Geography, ethnicity and religion
The smells to which your ancestor would have been exposed would have been dependent partly on their geographical location. There are currently a number of ongoing projects to create so-called ‘smelly maps’ of the world’s largest towns and cities (check these out at goodcitylife.org/smellymaps/project.php). Unfortunately, we don’t have such resources for the past, but if you know exactly where your ancestors lived you will be able to imagine some of the aromas that floated around the area – the salty tang of the sea and the pong of fish in coastal towns, the rank odour of rotting food and animal waste in the poorer streets of a city, the crisp perfume of apple orchards in the South West of England, or the whiff of woody heather and gorse in the mountainous regions of Wales and Scotland.

It was in the 19th century that our ordinary indigenous ancestors would probably first have encountered the unfamiliar smells of other parts of the world as they started to consume the produce of Empire, including curry and coconut, rum and cinnamon. Ancestors who immigrated to Britain from other places will have brought with them recipes for foods and drinks that included distinctive aromas and tastes.

Some of the smells to which our ancestors will have been exposed were connected to their religious rituals. Catholics and members of the Eastern Orthodox Church would have been familiar with the prolific use of incense (made from aromatic plant matter and oil resins) in their places of worship, for example. The ‘smells and bells’ of High Church Anglicanism, on the other hand, were levelled as criticism against it by more puritanical Protestant sects who eschewed incense, flowers and candles within their chapels.

Class and gender
Smells of a less pleasant kind probably featured prominently in our ancestors’ lives as well. People in the past – especially the poor – didn’t have access to the same levels of hygiene that we enjoy today and a constituent part of the olfactory history of any period before the 20th century, therefore, must be the smell of the people themselves! Full body baths before the widespread access to piped water in the 20th century, for example, were taken either infrequently, or not at all, by people in all social classes.

In time, of course, money allowed people better access to domestic bathing facilities, soap and other perfumed products, but the problem of body odour was by no means limited just to those at the bottom of society or to hard-working men! In the Georgian period, for example, wealthy women are said to have ‘carried a world of stench’, with their heavy gowns causing them to sweat a great deal and their underwear bleached in ‘chamber lye’, a kind of soap made from ashes and urine!

It’s worth remembering, of course, that perfumes made from natural ingredients had been used for centuries by those with cash to splash. Even those malodorous Georgian ladies could conceal their body odour, to some extent, with scents made from orange blossom and rose water! It wasn’t, however, until the late 19th century that mass-produced synthetic scents could be bought reasonably cheaply by the greater part of the population in chemists’ shops.

Occupations
Other smell factors in our ancestors’ lives will have emanated from the particular occupations they had. Early 20th-century miners caked in coal, for example, may have bathed only once a week; Victorian ‘night-sewer’ men must have stunk of the human waste that they carried on carts from inner-city locations to out-of-city dumps. And, on another tack entirely, many other of our ancestors’ occupations will have depended on them having a fine or accentuated sense of smell. Consider, for example, all these jobs in the food and drink industry that depended on the manufacture, improvement and storage of foods and drinks. If your ancestor dealt in fish or wine, coffee or cheese, his or her ‘nose’ would have been an important qualification for the job.

Smells and oral history
It is said that our sense of smell can retrieve far older memories than the senses of sight, hearing, touch and taste. If you have ever tried to interview elderly relatives about your family history you will probably be aware that prompts – such as photographs, souvenirs or snippets of music – can be invaluable. It’s worth knowing that when these prompts are in the form of smells, the response can be even greater, often evoking an emotional recollection (such as fear, disgust, pleasure and grief) alongside factual retrieval. If an elderly relative is reintroduced to the smells of the earliest parts of his or her childhood – particularly the first ten years – it’s possible that he or she may feel suddenly transported back there and, therefore, theoretically, may be more able to recall the names, dates and places that we as family history researchers so crave.

A fascinating thread on Gransnet (www.gransnet.com) includes many comments from users who note smells that remind them of their own lives and those of their families in the past. Many of these are pungent aromas such as mothballs, bacon, leather, cigars or creosote. Other people in the thread remember a smell and a sound in conjunction such as ‘The smell of Yorkshire puddings in the oven as the Billy Cotton Band show signature tune is playing on the radio’. There are many smell memories that are common to a stage of life – newly washed clothing, for instance, invariably leads people to think of their mothers in their own childhoods. Others are relevant to many people within a generation group. It has been reported, for example, that people born in the 1920s recall their early years when presented with the natural scents of flowers, grass, rose, soap and manure; while people born in the 1930s respond to flowers, hay, sea, air, pine and burning leaves. It is said that the memories of those born in the 1940s, on the other hand, emerge when they are presented with more manufactured scents such as baby powder and a mother’s perfume, that life in the 1950s is conjured up by cologne, crayons and playdough and, in the 1960s, by chlorine, detergent and motor oil!

As well as smell memories that relate to whole time periods or groups of people, remember that an individual’s history of smelling is also, to some extent, unique. Some of the commentators on the Gransnet site remember experiences that are highly singular to them with, for instance, the fragrance of ‘frangipani’ taking one back to a time when she lived in India as a child. Remember too that we all smell differently. This is partly due the different functioning of the hundreds of olfactory receptors in our bodies (caused by genetic differences), but also because we have different learnt attitudes to smells. A smell enjoyed by one elderly relative – chalk in a classroom, for example – might be repugnant to another depending on their respective experiences of school.

Museums and smell
In early museums it was common for people to pick up objects, smell, feel and even taste them. From the late 18th century onwards, however, exhibits were more usually placed in glass cases away from prying hands and noses and the sense of sight came to be prioritised as a tool of enquiry above all others.

In the past two decades, however, more and more museums have tried to give their visitors a multisensory experience. A new emphasis on the sense of smell – as well as the other non-visual senses – has been partly driven by the need to make museums more inclusive by appealing to people who are partially sighted or blind. Because of concerns about conservation, however, it isn’t really possible for most objects in museums actively to be handled and smelt as in the past. Curators, therefore, are using a variety of other methods for introducing scent into their galleries. These include motion sensors which squirt odour chemicals into the air, odorised crystals, pumps that spray whiffs of fragranced air, portable scent kits including perfume flasks or other odorised items.