Historical novels - people & places pages, some advice

When you have created a historical novel with a sack full of characters, names of so many places no longer on the map, religious cultures assassinated long ago by our dominant religions, foreign languages, and items that have no modern name, you will need to help the poor reader out a bit.

What I did not expect is the list to be twenty pages long and take four days to create and trim down to five pages. Thanks to Word (never thought I would thank it) you can erase your grammar check and re check. All the weird names will pop up. 

But, do not neglect this: like doing a study, make sure you know where you got your references from. Mark the book, mark the spot. With Kindle (I used iPad Kindle) you can highlight them in the app itself, but you are bound to have those books that are rare and not in a digital form. Save days and mark them properly when writing.

Or go nuts.