I thought I would start a thread, because I am being pleased with myself about this. It is something I have been contemplating for a long time because the BBC one is so poor; there seemed to be a use for a place where one could simply go and look up a person, and be able to sort it in any desired order and click from family member to family member by entry and so on, which the internet is ideal for. And I have this techie who can make it all work! Yay!
My method is that I have scrobbled the BBC descriptions from the net, because they have a few useful things in them, and then gone through The Book of The Archers making one blank entry for every person mentioned in it no matter how unimportant. It is divided into people beginning with every letter of the alphabet except Q and X because there are none of those – by first name, or surname if it is (eg) “Mr Adams”.
I am doing it that way because otherwise I would stick forever in Archer, there are so many of them. This way I proceed from Mr Adams (short) to Alice Carter (long) to Alex (short) to Andrene (short) and don’t get bored with any one person – although Anthony William Daniel Archer took a long time to do, Asty was a doddle. At the moment I have done twenty pages of Archers beginning with A and have eight to go. That’s 2% or less of the whole thing, but a definite start.
Every entry is written from scratch rather than copied verbatim, because I’m scrounging information from all the sources I can find; for instance Squire Lawson-Hope is always so named in The Book of The Archers, but is named as “Clive” in The Archers Encyclopaedia, and as “George” in To the Victor the Spoils by Jock Gallagher: which do I take as accurate? My every instinct says the latter because JG was writing closer to the time at which The Squire was on air, but it is a bit of a puzzle since he definitely wanted his nephew Clive to take over from him because Clive was his namesake as well as his only male heir… Should I give both names, and say why? and when did he die? TBoTA says 1954 but also has Admiral Bellamy selling his house to him in 1955.
When I have finished the BBC site people and the Book of The Archers ones, I will then add in any new ones in The Archers Encyclopaedia and finally go through Lowfield from 2000 onwards looking for people who were named and possibly had an actor too, though that isn’t essential: silents like Molly Button definitely have a place in this!
I’m trying to note them as they occur: “Sarah ?check it stud farm in Brampton ? is that Brampton Green?”, “Mr and Mrs De Freitas, B&B guests from hell” and so on.
This is why I should never be banned from Peet’s. It leads to unfeasibly large projects.