More Steamsmith Characters

[ysabetwordsmith]

My Google-fu is strong.  I've spent days trying to track down foundations for a couple of very important supporting characters in the Steamsmith series, and finally succeeded.  I couldn't find a convenient list of period London nobility, but found enough other references to assembled the necessary pieces.  There's kind of a thrill to digging through old genealogy looking for gaps where it would be easy to attach fresh characters, and finding ones that fit perfectly.  Plus a bonus alchemist I'd never even heard of who was on one of the same pages, and some very cool notes about a family's mineral collection.

Anyhow, the two obnoxious young noblemen who will be annoying Maryam are George Cavendish and William Percy.  You'll get to meet them presently; I have a poem in progress.

The Peerage is useful if you already know a family name to look up and want to see who's in it when.  Very handy for picking character names because you can nab an ancestor's name on the premise that people recycle names in-family (which nobles consistently do).

A Victorian offers a general guide to period life.  Among other things it has a whole book laid out in sections, of which I found "The London Season" particularly helpful.  I'm starting to get that "I need to visit a bookstore" feeling again, though -- I know there are guidebooks for this time period, mostly written for romance authors, that should have a lot of the information I'm needing for this series.

All About Surnames gives an idea of which names are (currently) common, including in Greater London.  Some of those are obviously historic U.K. names.

Victorian Names and Old Names proved useful for first names.  You have to be careful with these things, because sometimes there are sharp generational shifts.  The classics are usually safe, but still.  So I also hunted down Regency Names, much harder to find listings for than Victorian.

I thought you-all might get a kick out of this progress report.

Comments

But...

[marina-bonomi.livejournal.com]

You shouldn't make me drool on my keyboard, that's bad for electronics! ;-)

Re: But...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

*chuckle* Time to get a drool bucket, perhaps?

I'll keep you posted on developments. These blokes will be all kinds of fun.

[jake67jake]

I often spent more time naming my characters than actually writing the story. :-s I always had to had just the right name, with appropriate nicknames available.

Very interesting. I love English history in general. I did some research a few decades ago (in school) about Queen Victoria's line (there was a recessive gene that I cannot recall that I was tracing).

Thanks for the research. Good job!

[msstacy13.livejournal.com]

Speaking of Queen Victoria...

"A small press? When they talk about a royalty check, they mean a blood test for hemophillia."

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

It rarely takes me this much time to name characters. Usually they just tell me their names. But when I'm working with a specific time period and location, this far down the timestream where historic examples are recorded, then I get picky about accuracy. So that takes longer to determine or verify.

I'm glad you found the research interesting.

[msstacy13.livejournal.com]

The practice of reusing the same given/christian names
in successive generations was pretty much standard everywhere
until the Twentieth Century.
It's one of the problems with untangling family histories.
Harvey? Was that her uncle Harvey? Brother? Cousin? Nephew? Son?
They were all Harvey. Which was she talking about?

[westrider.livejournal.com]

It gets even worse in the Scandinavian countries where you'll have alternating generations of Hans Olafsson and Olaf Hansson in the first sons. Drives me nuts sometimes when I'm reading the multi-generational Icelandic Sagas or something and trying to keep everyone straight.

[msstacy13.livejournal.com]

*blink*

All afternoon, I'll be thinking of that Flintstones episode...
"Yah, he iss Sven and I am Ole."

*laugh*

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

The names mean "young" and "ancestor."

Re: *laugh*

[msstacy13.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's me,
putting the "dippity"
in serendipity...
:)

Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

In that regard, I'm bending the historic accuracy for the sake of clarity in several series. I try to avoid giving different characters the same names, or even names that are too similar. If I have to double up for some reason, I'll distinguish them with nicknames or descriptives or something like that. But in Victorian England, a room full of people would probably have several each of William, George, Charles, and Edward.

Re: Yes...

[msstacy13.livejournal.com]

Yeah,
and I'd guess that's why it was so common for friends
to address one another by their surnames,
the way Darcy and Bingley do in
Pride and Prejudice, for instance...