Both Gilbert Blythe and Mal Reynolds lived in Pennsylvania.

Have you ever done searches for character names just to see if anyone by that name actually existed? As you can tell by this post, I have. If the following post doesn’t earn me some kind of Super Nerd cred, I give up.

Let’s start with the world of Charlaine Harris and True Blood. The 1920 census records an Adele Stackhouse living in Brooklyn and a Jason Stackhouse in Pennsylvania. If you lived in Manhattan in 1900, Eric Nordman from Sweden might have been your neighbor.

As a teenager, I was devastated when I looked at an atlas and learned that Avonlea isn’t even a real place. But there were lots of Anne Shirleys (with Es and without), and a Gilbert Blythe lived in Philadelphia in 1900.

I wonder if the Matthew Cuthbert living in Buffalo in 1930 was as sweet as the one who lived in Avonlea?

Maybe Serenity’s captain is a descendant of Mal C. Reynolds, born October 1864 in Pennsylvania on Earth That Was.

There are many, many Elizabeth Bennets on the census rolls, but not a single Fitzwilliam Darcy. But then again, he was always too good to be true, wasn’t he?

Hundreds of Harry Potters lived in the U.S. over the decades, but I don’t think any of them were wizards.

This post only covers the U.S. census because I don’t have a “World Deluxe” subscription on Ancestry.com. So maybe Eric Northman and Mr. Darcy were hiding elsewhere in the world… As with all fictional characters, we can only wish.