ysabetwordsmith | More Steamsmith Characters (Reply)

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.