About Lara : Lara's Biography - Angeline Lodge-Croft

According to some sources, Lara's mother is called Angeline Lodge-Croft. We questioned the authenticity of this particular detail of Lara's biography back in 2017 after it appeared in the 20th anniversary book ''L’histoire de Tomb Raider", written by Alexandre Serel. For us, it was brought to light by author and classic TR fan Positively Amazonian on her Tumblr, but it  wasn't something we had ever heard of. So we set out to investigate its origins. It turns out that this was not the first sighting of a mother's name and it has been copied onto various  fansites.

The first thing to note is that in all biographies that have been released in official sources - Eidos website, official Lara Croft website, officially printed magazines such as "Lara's Book", game manuals, etc - it has only been Lara's father who was given a name. In our research, we wanted to look into various sources so that we didn't provide a biased view. We looked in strategy guides, Tomb Raider books and magazines, official sites and unofficial fansites in different languages. If you'd like to check these out, we included them on our long Tumblr post here. There are sources that include the name and some that don't. Not only can the name of 'Angeline' be seen on some of the smaller fansites but it is also on the more long standing ones too, such as Captain-Alban. It is found printed in the book 'Lara Croft Les Carnets Secrets' from 1999 as well as "L'histoire de Tomb Raider" by Alexandre Serel from 2017.

To help validate our reasoning, we tried to find dates, to not only stack the various sources in an order but to find out how early this bit of information came into existence, and to see if we could find out where it came from.

Our conclusion:  there are no official sources that we can find that mention Angeline Lodge-Croft but fansites have picked it up from somewhere. We believe it to be a fan made fact by Richard J. Pugh, who created the commonly accepted title of 'Duchess of Saint Bridget' for Lara.  Richard was a fan of the early versions of Lara and he created a fansite called 'Lara's Scrapbook', where he wrote two fan stories and his own biography, filling in the gaps that at the time, official sources had left blank.

Using dates, our strongest bit of proof that 'Angeline Lodge-Croft' is a fan made name for Lara's mother is that, not only are there no official biographies that mention it, but Richard's biography dates back to October 9th 1998, when he last updated it, and it has a Web Capture date of December 5th 1998.  The page can be seen here. At the bottom of the page he admits to making a lot of the details up, though he doesn't specifically say which parts were his, and he also gives Lara's father a different first name with Henshingly being a middle name. It might be of interest to mention how Richard's first story, titled "Lara Croft: Duchess of Saint Bridget", has a first release date of October 10th 1997, so he constructed his own biography around his fan story. However, in his story he doesn't name the mother or give the father the name of James, but it is in his second story that he uses both of these, in his fiction titled "Chronological Connundrum", dated to February 14th 1998.

Our second piece of evidence is that Captain-Alban once coloured coded their sources for their biography webpage. The part about Angeline is coloured red, which is written to have come from 'Lara's Scrapbook' (they also mention how Core Design/Eidos' biography is vague). They have also taken various other details from Richard, such as Lara's birthplace of Timmonshire and her height. The page adds that, at some point after their own biography, an official one can be seen on the Eidos website. Captain-Alban's biography page for Lara can be seen here at its earliest capture date of May 8th 1999.

One final point: the French book 'Lara Croft Les Carnets Secrets' has a release date of October 28th 1999 and was available after the date of Richard's biography for Lara. If the book was official, they may have taken their information from one of the largest French fansites, Captain-Alban, when they created it, despite there being official releases of Lara's biography from Eidos. We also haven't been able to find a source that mentions Angeline any earlier than Richard's biography, and so, we believe that the name was made up by a fan.