#phm#ryland grace#rocky the eridian#project hail mary spoilers
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Brooch in the form of grapes; glass and rose-cut diamonds set in silver backed with gold; possibly by Fonsèque and Olive, Paris, ca. 1889.
(via V&A)
1830 Ganymede with those strange window coats-
A severely underrated research tool for historical fiction writers (or anyone else doing historical research) is censuses. If there are censuses available for the time period and place you are writing, absolutely look them up! They’re such a useful resource for seeing how people lived at a certain time.
The website I’ve been using to look up American censuses is Ancestry.com, which can be accessed for free through the national archives. I’m not sure how how it works for other countries, but from the records I’ve looked at I was able to get a good sense of:
Names - You’ll get to see which ones were actually popular and which ones were uncommon but possible. Name websites are great, but they don’t always show the most accurate data for when a name was in use. Maybe that one “modern” name you want to use was used back then too. You’ll see people’s birth years as well so you can gauge how old it would make sense for a character with that name to be.
Demographics - You’ll be able to get a sense of how culturally diverse an area was and how many people moved there from other places. You’ll also see which jobs people held, which can tell you a lot about what the area may have looked like (especially useful if it’s not a well known location with accessible history) and where your characters might have to go to find a specific service.
Relationships - Marriage years are documented so you’ll see what age was considered normal for people to marry and the age gaps that were common. You’ll also see how likely it was to be divorced or widowed.
Literacy - Shows you how much education people may have had access to in that area. You’ll also see correlation between people’s race, occupation, and location on literacy.
Miscellaneous:
- The censuses I’ve been looking at list how many children a woman has had and how many are still living.
- Neighbors are listed so you’ll see who lives near who. Is it mostly boarders in the neighborhood? Farmers? Or are people of with assorted occupations living near each other?
Bottomline: use censuses!
'As if an angel dropped down from the clouds’, drawing by William Blake, 1809. Pen and grey ink, watercolour.
Illustration to 'Henry IV, Part I' IV, i, 108-9, formerly in an extra-illustrated second folio edition of Shakespeare (1632)
via British Museum
Baikal Teal. Ink and colour on paper. Kano School, Japan, 1836
via British Museum.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence.
Zither with case, body veneered with rosewood on pine, decorated with marquetry, made by Franz Lehner, Munich, 1867
(via V&A Explore The Collections)
John Gould (British, 1804–1881). Casuarius Westerman, 1873.
Watercolor, opaque watercolor, charcoal, graphite, and selectively applied glaze on wove paper.
(via Brooklyn Museum)
Scraper with mammoth ivory handle and stone (chert or flint) blade. Alaska, C19th(?).
via British Museum
