History, Geneaology, and the Making of Fictional Characters
One of my hobbies is Genealogy. Kinda fitting for a historian, you dig up other history, why not your own? This is really fun, and I have about 4 programs plus six notebooks with various entries. Yes, I’m on Ancestry.com. I’m on Family Search. I am also on Wikitree, which is a big group of genealogists who are putting together a huge family tree.
So, what’s weird about my family? Well, first, I have a pirate as the first Muslim in the Dutch Colony of New Amsterdam, present day New York City. His family was Dutch but his father, Jan Janszoon Van Haarlem van Salee married a Moroccan princess and converted. Their son was the pirate Anthony Jansen van Salee, also known as The Turk. He owned a lot of Coney Island New York for a while. He got married to a woman named Gietje Theunis Reyniers who was Dutch. Some of the stories from their lives gets pretty fun with lawsuits, affairs, and other interesting information. He’s got his own Wikipedia page.
But the important thing about them was that they had 4 daughters and a son. The son isn’t that well researched but his daughters became very important, married to wealthy merchants. Annica Jansen van Salee (1632-1698) married a man named Thomas Southard. Their daughter Abigail Southard was the great great grandmother of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Yes, that Vanderbilt, the railroad and sailing magnate who became one of the richest men in American history. He endowed Vanderbilt University.
And, of course, the Vanderbilt family has a lot of very interesting people, being somewhat one of the “royal” families of America.
A more recent name you might know is fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt. You probably know more about her son, CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
Another couple of people who are descended from the Mad Turk of New York are Jacqueline Kennedy and actor Humphrey Bogart.
Thomas and Annica’s son Isaac Southard moved west from New York and his descendants ended up in Iowa, where my mom was the granddaughter of Lawrence J. Southard. The people in the photo to the right are Lawrence’s parents, Moses and Caroline (Brown) Southard. Yep, I’m a cousin somewhere removed to one of the richest men in America. But we didn’t get the money.
One of the weirdest things (I did say my family was weird) is that I have two parents (ok, that’s not so strange) and both my father’s side and my mother’s side have Browns who married Claytons. And as far as I can tell, there’s no overlap on those. This is the chart with the two families. My dad’s Brown family is the top one, the bottom is the Southard side of my mom.
So, this whole family line thing can get complicated. Really complicated at times.
Why am I telling you this stuff? It’s not like you guys want to know all the little details. I’m telling you about it because it does have to do with my writing.
I know my characters well. I do a lot of research on the things that I have them doing. I can tell you that Marcus Lancaster was born 1 August 1430 at 19:14 in Tregon, Wales. He died in the War of the Roses at the Battle of Towton, 29 March 1461. It’s also where he was turned into a vampire. Jesse Chamberlain was born 18 June 1839 @ 2:27 in Bulloch Crossroads, Georgia. Eadwina Urqhardt (Arianne Campbell’s real name) was born 13 Jan 1363 at 23:47 in Tain Scotland. She was turned there by a vampire named Viktor Alexandru.
Lilly was born 10 March 1880 at 6:05 at Des Allemands Louisiana. Her father gave her to Madame Lulu White of Mahogany Hall when she was 8. His wife, Lilly’s mother, died in childbirth with the next child and he couldn’t take care of her. Lulu was wealthy and could take the girl in. He didn’t care if she was put into prostitution, he just wanted out.
I even have Baron’s information, born 31 October 1899 at 0:13 in New Orleans.
The chart at the right is his astrology chart. Yes, Mr. I Love All The Little Girl Kitties is a Scorpio. Is anyone shocked at that??
Why do I do this? So I know the characters and their backstory. I went so far as to make astrology charts for each of them. I know their personalities and the quirks. Each of those things give color to the story and it explains a lot as to why the characters act as they do.
I love to do the history that I put into the books. It’s like the people around Lilly’s death, funeral, and internment in the first few chapters of Lilly’s Angel. Everyone in those chapters, with the exception of Lilly, Marcus, and the bouncer at Mahogany Hall, Abe, were in New Orleans at that time, doing those jobs. The policemen who come to make the report on Lilly’s death were real, I got their names from a thesis of a woman at Tulane. They were working the Storyville district during 1900. The girls in the brothel were all real, I went to the U.S. Census for 1900 to get their names. Yes, the census takes information from everywhere, including brothels and prisons.
The mayor, the other madams, the embalmer and undertaker were all real. I sourced them from the Times Picayune newspaper for that time. The city directory gave me the business people’s information. And I looked up the “second line” bands who were active at the time and found one that was still a group from pre-1900 to the time I wrote Lilly’s Angel. I had permission to use them.
Other characters are based on friends. Reba is a girl I went to high school with. I did a fund raiser to get book 2, Marcus’s Vampire published and her husband bought the character I had as an angel as a surprise present for his wife. The guy Sullivan kills is a friend/son of my sister. The navy guard who stops Sullivan after he goes to the mall for items for Lilly is the son of one of my best friends, and he was in the navy at the time I wrote it. Nurses named after friends, I have all of these written down.
Some day I hope to do a Guide to Fangs & Halos. Having all this info really deserves to be in it’s own book.
And where are we going in book 5? Lilly and the former angels need to get out of Houston so I have a place all picked out to put them. A hint: it has to do with an old silent movie from 1922 and what that has to do with the angels, the vampires, and the Vampire Council. And it’s out of the country.
So keep watching this space. I have a few chapters to finish and then edits. It’s coming. Soon.
References
Several Sites with the Anthony Jansen Van Salee information (I love this stuff)
A long discussion of all the legal wrangling Anthony Van Salee was involved in. This is very long, but if you’re into history or New York, this may be fascinating to you .
A very interesting page on Anthony’s wife, Griet Reyniers
https://www.genealogieonline.nl/family-tree-ransbottom/P691.php