Tommy Riddle's birth (was No Sex, Please)

[grannybat84112]

No: HPFGUIDX 84022

Geoff Bannister and Pippin_999 caught my attention:

 > Geoff again:
> > I don't know whether you're in the UK, but certainly in the 
> > case of adoptions and possibly orphanage situations...
> > the details of parents are withheld. ...My point is that 
> > often, children from an orphanage  might be adopted or fostered 
> > and thus this information would be kept under wraps.
> 
> I was able to look  this up thanks to 
> some of the more prominent UK orphanages who've put their
> history on the web. At the time of Riddle's birth, an  infant 
> would have been fostered for the first five or six years of life  
> then brought to the orphanage. The child's name was changed, 
> but efforts would have been made by the orphanage to locate the  
> father of the child so as to collect child support. Riddle might  
> not have known his real name until the Hogwarts letter came.

Oh, this opens up all sorts of possibilities! Perhaps Baby Tom was 
thrust into a homelife as Dursley-ish as Harry's; or perhaps he felt 
loved and secure with his foster parents, then being removed from 
that environment is what began his hatred of life and people in 
general. (How likely is it that the foster parents would have allowed 
him to be taken back by the orphanage, though, if they had grown fond 
of him? Wouldn't they have adopted him?) The arrival of his Hogwarts 
letter started the process that focused the boy's seething but 
generic resentment into a clearly defined hatred fueled by the 
information he discovered about his true origins.

I'm wondering if it wasn't during this period, the crucial formative 
years with his foster family, that Tom Riddle developed his fear and 
hatred of death. That piece of information Voldemort reveals during 
the duel with Dumbledore in the Ministry atrium is crucial to the 
entire story: There is nothing worse than death...

Tom Riddle didn't pursue immortality just to prove the extent of his 
wizarding power to himself and the world at large. He didn't alter 
his body beyond human limits just because he knows that pervasive 
uneasiness about dying that most human beings feel. He doesn't kill 
after he tortures because it's simply a neat, easy way to dispose of 
people who obstruct his goals. No, he kills rather than leaves his 
victims broken in body and soul because he believes death is the 
worst experience he can visit upon them.

Tom Riddle turned into Voldemort because he ***fears*** death.

Some traumatic event had to bring about this phobia. Something 
overwhelming. An event so frightening that the memory of it still 
drives him decades after it happened. Something that left him feeling 
so powerless that he's dedicated his existence to ensuring that he 
never feels so helpless ever again. 

Something like witnessing the slow, lingering death of someone Tom 
Riddle loved in his childhood....


Then the Sergeant Majorette said:
>
>I was surfing through the "QuickQuotes" section of The Leaky
>Cauldron, and found one article which states that JKR's grandmother
>(doesn't say which one) was illegitimate and "abandoned" in a London
>orphanage where she was adopted by the proprietors. The quotation
>marks on the word 'abandoned' are mine: the article goes on to state
>that she was regularly visited by solicitors until she was 14.

Excelsior!! Theorists assemble!

Can you remember the approximate date of that article? I'd like to 
devour it myself.

Grannybat