Just a thought concerning Lily

[Jo Ann]

No: HPFGUIDX 95685

AngelWolf05 at w... wrote:
> Has anyone ever considered that perhaps Lily and Petunia could be 
> the children of squibs?? If muggle parents can produce a wizard/
> witch child why couldn't squibs produce one. Think about what
> Petunia says in SS, "Our parents were so proud! We have a witch in
> the family!" Maybe the pride was because that after a few 
> generations of scribs in the Evans family, maybe a witch was
> finally born? And maybe the WW considers a long line of squibs to 
> be all muggle after a while and that is why Lily is refered to as
> Muggle?

This makes a lot of sense to me, since one would expect a "true" 
Muggle family's reaction to a letter from Hogwart's to be confusion 
and perhaps alarm or anger, rather than pride, at least initially.  
Muggles aren't supposed to know about the magical world, after all.

Actually, it occurs to me that the terms "Muggle" and "Squib" may be 
misleading.  The only difference between the two, as far as I can 
tell, is the magical or non-magical status of the person's parents.

Furthermore, according to a very interesting essay I stumbled across 
while researching for this post (and I apologize if someone else has 
already analyzed this to death,) if we project the number of 
ancestors that each of us has had going back, say, 64 generations, we 
arrive at a number much larger than the total number of people who 
have ever existed on Earth.

Conclusion: all people living on Earth today are related to one 
another, probably many times over.  Here's the URL of the essay, for 
those interested:

http://members.optusnet.com.au/exponentialist/Generations_and_Populati
on_Doublings.htm

If this is correct, then terms like "pureblood," "halfblood," 
and "mudblood" are not only discriminatory and morally reprehensible, 
they are completely fallacious.  Any Muggle walking down the street 
anywhere on the planet might trace his ancestry straight back to a 
magus on the level of one of Hogwart's founders, or for that matter, 
Merlin himself.  And the purest of pureblood families could (and do) 
produce a Squib--for all practical purposes, a slightly misplaced 
Muggle--at any time.

I think that the ability (and/or inability) to use magic is 
controlled, at least in part, by genetics.  Either a Muggle or a 
Squib is simply a person who was born either lacking all the 
necessary genes to be able to use magic (but may still carry some of 
them, and be able to pass them along,) or else a person who did 
inherit a combination of genes which somehow suppresses the ability.

Conversely, a so-called "mudblood" is nothing more than a person who 
either didn't inherit the magic-repressing factor, or whose parents 
each carried recessive magic genes which combined to make their 
offspring a viable magus.

This would explain why both Squibs and magi like Hermione or Lily  
exist: they don't spring out of nowhere, they just get lucky or 
unlucky in the crapshoot that is genetics.

So, following all this to its logical conclusion, it's safe to assume 
that *all* of the characters in the book are probably related to one 
another in some degree.  The real question is, how far back, and does 
anyone living know about the connections?

Thoughts?

Jo Ann Spencer