Naming Convention in Early Divergences

I'm writing up a timeline set in an alternate English Civil War Scenario, and it has occurred to me as a relative newbie to the practise of alternate history that I have no idea how to justify the inclusion of otl figures who were born past the point of divergence. Is there a general practise that people use to solve this issue?
 
I generally am of the school that if they would have been relatively untouched by whatever changes you make they would probably still exist. For instance, if Brazil remains a monarchy, Franklin Roosevelt is probably still born but weather or not he becomes President is up to you.
 
I'm writing up a timeline set in an alternate English Civil War Scenario, and it has occurred to me as a relative newbie to the practise of alternate history that I have no idea how to justify the inclusion of otl figures who were born past the point of divergence. Is there a general practise that people use to solve this issue?

You can't, at least not unless they were conceived before it.
 
I tend to follow the 'Knock-on' effect, where a POD in one place doesn't effect the history of faraway regions, at least at first. For example, my timeline centers around Borneo with a POD in the 1840's, with the effects slowly spreading outwards throughout the world as time goes on. The knock-ons won't reach India until the 1850's and the effects there won't change the systemic problems of EIC rule, leading to a similar Indian Rebellion, and it isn't until 1866 that the effects begin to change European history.

In a more personal fashion, you could include OTL figures past the POD by changing their genders or having their siblings take on the mantle of history. It's a bit of a cop-out, but it keeps at least some semblance of grounding and prevents you from making completely original characters on the fly.
 
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butterfly net is up to the author.

Fundamentalist butterflyists, like @Analytical Engine there, insist that everything that has an element of chance in it after the POD must be re-randomized. Re-roll the dice, in other words. And they point out, rightly, that many many more things have an element of chance in them than we realize.

A strong version of the butterfly net is to say that all the dice rolls turn out the same way. The only differences caused by the POD are the ones where there is a traceable cause and effect from the POD. This is defensible, it appears to me, from both a literary standpoint and also from the standpoint of historical investigation. An even stronger version of the butterfly net would put a thumb on the scales to say that randomness is *attracted* to OTL except for the direct and traceable cause and effect from the POD.

Be aware that if you start from your POD and move forward, the further you get into history the more you will break immersion if you have OTL events and people. If you want to have that disorienting sense of strangeness that happens when you mix familiar OTL stuff with a different world from your POD, best practice is to start in medias res where Winston Churchill is the 9th Lord Protector of England, or whatever, and not get very detailed on the back story.
 
I’m of the “one year after the PoD everyone born in the same small region is changed. Ten years and the country is changed. Twenty years and the world is.” Of course, if it is a very small PoD like a peasant baby in the early HRE dying, then it will happen much slower. If it is a large one, like a stillborn Victoria, then it will be much faster. And, if it directly leads to something big like a war, then all bets are off.
 
If you can't justify it otherwise, just say that it was a coincidence and everyone just so happens to be incredibly similar to OTL historical figures.
 
I'm writing up a timeline set in an alternate English Civil War Scenario, and it has occurred to me as a relative newbie to the practise of alternate history that I have no idea how to justify the inclusion of otl figures who were born past the point of divergence. Is there a general practise that people use to solve this issue?
Easy solution, do whatever the hell would make your story more interesting.

Butterfly effect, in an AH context, is not a science, it's a trope, and tropes can be bent, shaped, discarded or played straight to the will of the author.

I have a 14th century POD and I have had OTL names crop up in mid 20th century. Mostly as jokes or references, but still.
 
Plausibly, you can have a similar child with a similar name, but you probably can't have the same child. The odds are one in a million.
There is also a one in a million chance you'll get any other combination, though if some one has a common name, and the POD didn't change that, then you have a much high chance of getting the same name because due to naming patterns.
 
For me, I redo all births after the POD with OTL for reference. Since reproduction involves a quite literally random combination of genes literally any deviation in conception can result in different offspring. However, you could say the genetic recombination goes exactly the same because again the process is random so you do have the leeway.
 

Deleted member 97083

The way to satisfy most members of both crowds (purist butterfly extremists and sensible, reasonable determinists alike ;)) is to write the TL in your drafts as if you have similar OTL characters and personalities, but change their names.

If you have a POD in 400 and the Eastern Roman Empire still exists in the 500s, you can still add an Emperor Justinian whose actual personality and goals are almost the same--this fictional version of the character merely reacting differently because different chains of events are happening. Just change "Justinian's" name to Zeno or Michael or Heraclius and have him develop differently due to a different life and rule, then it's an original character.

Alternate History is a fiction and art, not a quantum physics experiment with implications for universal causality. You're just writing a story and if imagining OTL characters in the story makes it more compelling and interesting, why not use them?
 
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I'm butterfly fundamentalist in theory, but in practice it is hard to write TL, if every random event, including conception, MUST be different from OTL. I treat AH more like tought experiment.
Also, there is another problem-our knowledge of the past is limited, we don't know, what Mr. X was doing during periods of his life not mentioned in history books, we don't know about all interactions between person X and Y, more we go into details, we see more connections between event A and event B, even if they seem to be unrelated at first look, with unlimited historical knowledge we'll see even more. So any TL is by default only approximation, not exact simulation of possible, alternate path of history.
 
My rule of thumb as an "attempting" writer is if it is more useful to use otl then go for it. For example if I say Chancellor Abraham Lincoln, or even Chancellor Joshua Lincoln the reader already has a concept that I can build off of. If I said Chancellor Fred Finklestein I start from scratch. If it doesn't make a difference then just making someone up is fine.



(minor pet-peeve nitpick from someone who was trained to analyse statistics in college: if you are arguing everything is random and exclude otl every time then it is no longer random because you confined yourself for otl to never randomly happen.)
 
Easy solution, do whatever the hell would make your story more interesting.

Butterfly effect, in an AH context, is not a science, it's a trope, and tropes can be bent, shaped, discarded or played straight to the will of the author.

I have a 14th century POD and I have had OTL names crop up in mid 20th century. Mostly as jokes or references, but still.
agreed. i'm planning for my own ASB ATL to involve frickin' Winston Churchill becoming President of the United States in a world where he was a natural-born American citizen. wanna know what the POD is?

...i actually don't know either just yet, but it's set sometime in the Stone Age :p the point is that i'm writing the TL for the story rather than for plausibility, and i fully support anyone else who writes their TLs for that reason, because ultimately we don't know what would be different since we can only ever definitively view the one TL ;)



my own suggestion regarding naming in just about any TL is to use parallel etymology for a name or otherwise allude to it in some way. one in my own TL is a complete parallel to Cortez and La Malinche's son in a TL where it was Cesare Borgia, not Cortez, who conquered the Aztecs and took La Malinche (who herself is known by a different name ITTL but is still the same person) as his mistress, producing one Martino Borgia instead of Martin Cortez. another example, though not one that i plan to include in the TL itself, is that you could write a rather obvious expy of Churchill as "Winslow Churchvale" or something, a reference that everyone reading it the story would get but also immediately indicating that this is basically off-brand Churchill :p it's easier to write such expys less obviously when the character is, say, "the US president of 1980, but Italian" where you could write an Italian expy of Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan named something like Jacopo Facchino or Rinaldo Piccolore, respectively
 
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