[HPforGrownups] Re: Heir of Slytherin ... or NOT???

[Patricia Bullington-McGuire]

No: HPFGUIDX 58136

On Sun, 18 May 2003, Steve wrote:

> How can a family line that has existed for over a 1,000 years die out?

It's easy enough, if each generation only had a few children.  If a couple
only has a single child and that child never reproduces for whatever
reason (infertile, doesn't like kids, gay, dies young, etc.), then that
branch of the tree dies off.  The more children a family has, the less
likely that is to happen, but if family members are routinely limiting
themselves to small families (one or two kids, the way many modern couples
do now that reliable contraceptives are available), the clan as a whole
becomes vulnerable to dying out.  

This becomes even more likely if family members frequently marry within
the family (first or second cousins, for instance) to maintain their
"purity" or to preserve the family inheritance, as has often happened
through history among elite families.  Normally, if Cousin A and Cousin B
marry outsiders and have kids they would produce two new branches of the
family tree.  However, if they marry each other and have kids, they only
produce one new branch, making the family tree much narrower.
 
<snip> 
> As
> others have pointed out, given double lifetimes and double fertile
> child bearing years of wizards and witches, it would seem reasonable
> that all families are somewhat large thereby creating many decendants. 

Except we haven't seen many examples of large wizarding families.  In
fact, the Weasleys are the only one I can think of, and the Malfoys'
sneering comments about the Weasleys having more children than they can
afford suggests to me that families that large are not the norm.  I
suspect that magical folk have been taking advantage of good magical
contraception for a long, long time, allowing them to limit the size of
their families in a way muggles have only been able to achieve relatively
recently.  There is no canon to directly support that, though.


----
Patricia Bullington-McGuire	<patricia at obscure.org>

The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered
three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the
purely hypothetical.  They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each
nonexisted in an entirely different way ... 
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"