Let's say you need a female character, a beautiful French assassin who's 26 years old. And you want her name to be right. Here's a nifty trick I tried and it actually worked: Go to google translate and say you want to translate from English to French, and your term is "Most popular baby names in 1985."
Then, in another tab go to google.fr, and paste the results into the search window. There you go. Cheap and easy, and it actually works fairly well.