[HPforGrownups] Salazar Slytherin's descendants (Was Re: A strange silver instrument)

[Kathryn Cawte]

No: HPFGUIDX 86430


 "Berit Jakobsen"

 He can speak
> > parseltongue BECAUSE he is a direct descendant of Salazar; in fact:
> > He's the Heir of Slytherin.
>

K

What makes us think that the Heir has to be a descendent anyway. Why can't
it be more a case of someone who embodies the characteristics that that
House holds in highest esteem. With purebloods being so keen on who's
related to whom, wouldn't everyone have known if Riddle's mother was a
descendent of Salazar.

What I really want to know is how TR managed to convince anyone that Hagrid
was behind the opening of the Chamber. I mean a half-giant Gryffindor? Who
in their right mind is going to believe he was the Heir?

I know that Harry's parselmouth ability mad people suspicious of him, but I
would have thought people would have a hard job swallowing the idea of him
as Heir too, especially if it was a direct descendent thing. After all Lily
was a muggleborn and presumably James' family history wouldn't be terribly
difficult to trace.

Before someone points out how difficult it is to go back a thousand years in
your family tree it can be done in the muggle world and that's without
magically preserved documents (well if I was a wizarding lawyer I'd make
sure there was a way of preserving documents). Plus wizarding generations
are probably longer than human ones since they live so much younger -
consider for example if Dumbledore wanted to trace his family tree he would
probably remember his parents and grandparents before having to do any
research. He is 150 years old so he was born in 1840ish, assume for the sake
of argument that his parents were 50ish when they had him (roughly the
muggle equivalent of being in one's thirties), they would have been born
1790s and his grandparents in the 1740s - so we've already got back a
quarter of the distance to SS and we've only gone through three generations!
(for people who have trouble visualizing these dates that means that
Dumbledore would have a good memory of people born nearly 40 years before
the US came into being)

Please someone correct my figures if I'm wrong, this is all off the top of
my head.

K