Tommy Riddle's birth (was Re: No Sex, Please, We're British)

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 83804

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Geoff Bannister" 
<gbannister10 at a...> wrote:

> Geoff again:
> I don't know whether you're in the UK or not, but certainly in the 
> case of adoptions and possibly orphanage situations (look at 
Oliver  Twist for example), the details of parents are withheld. My 
wife was  adopted and we spent a lot of time round about 1980 
trying to trace her real mother and we were for ever running up 
blind alleys. In the  end, we found her more by luck than by 
judgement. Since then,  legislation has been introduced which 
does allow an adoptee to find  these details out. My point is that 
often, children from an orphanage  might be adopted or fostered 
and thus this information would be kept  under wraps. <<

Thanks for confirming my research! 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 and 
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.

We've seen that Muggle locks and keys are no match for an 
ingenious teenage wizard, so I imagine Riddle was able to find 
out everything the orphanage knew about his father.

Pippin