Something that came up in a conversation offsite between me and Adelene Dawner:
Both in canon and MoR, where are all the grandparents and great-grandparents?
Supposedly, wizards have much longer lifespans than Muggles. I’m a Muggle, about to turn 22, and I’ve still got a grandparent left. Meanwhile, baby Harry managed to be orphaned without any of his grandparents stepping forward to take him in, or even trying to have a relationship with him. Perhaps Lily and Petunia’s folks, Muggles both, were dead by this time—they never show up in canon—but what happened to pureblood James’s mom and dad? Or their parents, or their siblings—when these people could all easily have lived to be a hundred years old, there should be some many-generation families running around.
The only visible ancestors we have before the canon epilogue are Augusta Longbottom, and, by the end of the series, Andromeda Tonks. Old characters like Dumbledore and McGonagall exist, but seem unmarried, childless, grandchildless. The Weasleys had at least one great-aunt and one great-uncle, but neither Molly nor Arthur has parents coming around for dinner, and they try to be an awfully close-knit family.
The only visible ancestors we have before the canon epilogue are Augusta Longbottom, and, by the end of the series, Andromeda Tonks.
Not only that, but if I remember correctly, Augusta Longbottom was portrayed as being considered old. Wizards seem to follow the same schedule as muggles for settling down and having kids, so she should have been about 70 when Nevil started at Hogwarts—not even middle-aged compared to a 200-year expected lifespan.
I’m not sure this is too unusual relative to our own society: these days life expectancy in Western countries is around 80-100, but people still tend to be considered to be getting old at fifty, relatively old by sixty and definitely old by seventy. In our case though we have the excuse that it’s a recent change.
This implies pretty awful things about wizarding society, if we can safely assume that people with children retire around sixty and then spend the next century or so being ornamental, and that it’s been like that for centuries.
The usual handwave by people discussing Rowling’s canon is that any missing family members were probably casualties of the civil war against Voldemort, I think.
There’s no obvious comparative shortage of people from any particular age group. Unless the Death Eaters and the Order of the Phoenix selectively went around a little over a decade ago and picked off enemies with grandchildren/married offspring who were likely to go on to have kids, but not non-grandparents with kids—which, really, why? - this is an unsatisfactory explanation. And it’d have to be both sides. We’re not just missing Molly’s Prewett ancestors, we’re missing Abraxas Malfoy too.
Death Eaters seem to have a proclivity for killing one’s family. That would explain very thin family trees for anyone that was involved with the war. That’s because families of DE-opposers are killed, because people with less family would be more likely (i.e., less demotivated) to fight against Death Eaters, and people already fighting DEs are less likely to start families to avoid having a lever over them. The obvious exceptions, like Ron’s large family, are children born after the war, sort of like baby-boomers.
Yeah, you’re right. I was confusing Voldemort’s war with the earlier war (the one matching WW2). I only realized the distinction when I was too far from a computer to retract the comment. That said, Ron’s family could still be just an exception. The logic still stands, it just went from “supported” to “not supported” by evidence (rather than “contradicted”).
There was a war with Grindelwald that took the place of World War 2 in the wizarding world. Presumably, many of the older generations perished in that conflict as well. And we have few tales of the potentially-bloody history prior to that.
There was a war with Grindelwald that took the place of World War 2 in the wizarding world.
It’s very slightly hinted in canon that these were actually the same war. In MoR (and, I would guess offhand, quite a few other fanfics), this is pretty well confirmed.
They have just been through a war—many such people may have died. It’s also possible that most wizards/witches had children much later, and the relatively ‘young’ families we see were a response to the war.
It is possible that most wizards/witches die not of old age, but simply because being a wizard is such a HUGE occupational hazard. If you use magic every day, you can make a fatal mistake eventually; especially if your magical power keeps increasing with age, whereas your memory / ability to concentrate goes down. And there are everyday spells that can easily kill you if you get them wrong, Apparition comes to mind. Yet it is possible that death in a magic accident is so common that it isn’t even viewed as big tragedy.
You’d have to be either extremely good (Dumbledore), or very careful (Moody, McGonagall), or both to survive to an old age.
Something that came up in a conversation offsite between me and Adelene Dawner:
Both in canon and MoR, where are all the grandparents and great-grandparents?
Supposedly, wizards have much longer lifespans than Muggles. I’m a Muggle, about to turn 22, and I’ve still got a grandparent left. Meanwhile, baby Harry managed to be orphaned without any of his grandparents stepping forward to take him in, or even trying to have a relationship with him. Perhaps Lily and Petunia’s folks, Muggles both, were dead by this time—they never show up in canon—but what happened to pureblood James’s mom and dad? Or their parents, or their siblings—when these people could all easily have lived to be a hundred years old, there should be some many-generation families running around.
The only visible ancestors we have before the canon epilogue are Augusta Longbottom, and, by the end of the series, Andromeda Tonks. Old characters like Dumbledore and McGonagall exist, but seem unmarried, childless, grandchildless. The Weasleys had at least one great-aunt and one great-uncle, but neither Molly nor Arthur has parents coming around for dinner, and they try to be an awfully close-knit family.
Not only that, but if I remember correctly, Augusta Longbottom was portrayed as being considered old. Wizards seem to follow the same schedule as muggles for settling down and having kids, so she should have been about 70 when Nevil started at Hogwarts—not even middle-aged compared to a 200-year expected lifespan.
I’m not sure this is too unusual relative to our own society: these days life expectancy in Western countries is around 80-100, but people still tend to be considered to be getting old at fifty, relatively old by sixty and definitely old by seventy. In our case though we have the excuse that it’s a recent change.
This implies pretty awful things about wizarding society, if we can safely assume that people with children retire around sixty and then spend the next century or so being ornamental, and that it’s been like that for centuries.
The usual handwave by people discussing Rowling’s canon is that any missing family members were probably casualties of the civil war against Voldemort, I think.
There’s no obvious comparative shortage of people from any particular age group. Unless the Death Eaters and the Order of the Phoenix selectively went around a little over a decade ago and picked off enemies with grandchildren/married offspring who were likely to go on to have kids, but not non-grandparents with kids—which, really, why? - this is an unsatisfactory explanation. And it’d have to be both sides. We’re not just missing Molly’s Prewett ancestors, we’re missing Abraxas Malfoy too.
Death Eaters seem to have a proclivity for killing one’s family. That would explain very thin family trees for anyone that was involved with the war. That’s because families of DE-opposers are killed, because people with less family would be more likely (i.e., less demotivated) to fight against Death Eaters, and people already fighting DEs are less likely to start families to avoid having a lever over them. The obvious exceptions, like Ron’s large family, are children born after the war, sort of like baby-boomers.
Ron is the second-youngest child in his large family, and he’s Harry’s age. So most of his siblings were born during the war.
Yeah, you’re right. I was confusing Voldemort’s war with the earlier war (the one matching WW2). I only realized the distinction when I was too far from a computer to retract the comment. That said, Ron’s family could still be just an exception. The logic still stands, it just went from “supported” to “not supported” by evidence (rather than “contradicted”).
There was a war with Grindelwald that took the place of World War 2 in the wizarding world. Presumably, many of the older generations perished in that conflict as well. And we have few tales of the potentially-bloody history prior to that.
It’s very slightly hinted in canon that these were actually the same war. In MoR (and, I would guess offhand, quite a few other fanfics), this is pretty well confirmed.
They have just been through a war—many such people may have died. It’s also possible that most wizards/witches had children much later, and the relatively ‘young’ families we see were a response to the war.
It is possible that most wizards/witches die not of old age, but simply because being a wizard is such a HUGE occupational hazard. If you use magic every day, you can make a fatal mistake eventually; especially if your magical power keeps increasing with age, whereas your memory / ability to concentrate goes down. And there are everyday spells that can easily kill you if you get them wrong, Apparition comes to mind. Yet it is possible that death in a magic accident is so common that it isn’t even viewed as big tragedy. You’d have to be either extremely good (Dumbledore), or very careful (Moody, McGonagall), or both to survive to an old age.