enigmatic Bill .... the missing Weasley child

[Rita Winston]

No: HPFGUIDX 21340

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., vayabe at y... wrote:

> [Bill] might indeed have lost a brother to Voldemort. However, if
> that's the case, it was more likely an older brother as I don't see 
> why only one child would have been killed if a DE had attaqued 
> Arthur's familly and it seems unlikely that Molly would have left a
> very young child alone.

One way in which older siblings could survive an attack that killed 
younger siblings is if the older siblings were away at Hogwarts when 
their home was attacked. The parents could have survived the attack 
because they were away from home and had left one pair of grand- 
parents babysitting. We haven't heard any mention of Weasley grand- 
parents, but it's hard to view that as proof that they're dead (and 
must have died young, considering that wizard folk live twice as long 
as Muggles), as we haven't heard of ANY grand-parents except 
Neville's grandmother. I wonder why JKR wrote such a grand-parent- 
less world, no one even receiving mail from grandparents who 
retired to Florida...   

During that digression, I was checking my time-line, which says that 
Percy was born during Bill's first year at Hogwarts and the twins 
were born during Charlie's first year at Hogwarts, so if child[ren] 
born between Charlie and Percy were killed while Bill and Charlie 
were at school, such as while Mrs. Weasley had gone to hospital to 
birth the twins, the question would be 'why did Percy survive?"

So I have suddenly just now come up with a New Theory: Arthur and 
Molly had originally intended to have only the usual two children, 
but when Bill went away to school, they found that they were lonely 
with only one at home, and would be even lonelier in two years when 
Charlie also was away, so they decided to have some more.