Hi, just wanted to say that I recently watched Indiana Jones for the first time ever, and immediately consumed as much fanfiction about him and Marion and found you on Ao3 (and tumblr of course)
I loved reading your fics and they're very inspiring!! I just wanted to ask how you go about researching them? Like, where do you start? I love reading the endnotes on your fics because of the research (and your Tumblr wips) 🖤🖤
Thank you so much! That means the world to me! 💖
Honestly, my research "starts" with reading a lot of historical fiction as a child and having grandparents who grew up during the Great Depression. One set of grandparents were around high school age at the time ROTLA is set, and the other were in elementary school. I use some of those stories to ground the everyday life elements. For example, my grandma has talked about never having fresh vegetables except root vegetables in the winter because food storage and transportation looked profoundly different back then. So when Indy makes dinner in Once Upon a Midnight Dreary, he only uses carrots and pickled tomatoes. I also think back to other media set in that time period. In Welcome Home, Mrs. Reese serves up oatmeal, toast, and eggs to her borders because that's what Mrs. Kittredge serves to her borders in the Kit Kittredge American Girl books, and it's explained in the books that those are all items that work well to feed a crowd on the cheap.
I also do a lot of Googling to fill in the gaps and try to make sure nothing seems anachronistic. When Abner recalls Marion's childhood baby doll, I had already thought of the comparison to a doll's eyes closing, but I wasn't 100% sure dolls with sleeper eyes would've been around when Marion was that young. I knew they were a thing by the 1930s/40s because I've seen vintage ones and I knew they were either not a thing or very, very rare in the 1800s because neither the snotty, rich neighbor of Laura Ingalls Wilder nor any media I'd seen about Victoria and Albert's children mentioned them. So I looked it up, and they were first invented around 1885 became more available, especially in the USA, around 1914. I figured a well-travelled fellow like Abner could've nabbed one overseas a little earlier than that, so I kept the detail in.
For other research, these are some of my favorite sources:
Vintage Dancer: I often start here for clothing and accessories
Catalogs and Wishbooks: For home goods and clothing, Sears was the common person's go-to
For home plans/layouts and some furnishings, the Internet Archive has some great stuff from home building companies like the Nationwide House Plan Service, Gordon Van Tines homes, Aladdin Homes, and Sears Homes
The Indiana Jones novelizations
Indiana Jones fandom wiki (self explanatory)
And finally, just Googling "[thing] in the 1930s" will pull up surprisingly useful results! Just don't use the AI descriptions.
I'm always happy to answer questions or chat about my fandom stuff, so don't be shy! :)
