Orphan TMR (was AlwaysMonday/book date/orphan TMR/Salicylic/HouseElves/Names/Narcissa/Quill)

[Cathy Drolet]

No: HPFGUIDX 110101

Marita said: 
<< In fact, how did [Tom Marvolo Riddle] find out about his father
abandoning his mother in the first place? I can't accept the
coincidence of another letter that explains everything left with a
baby. >>

Catlady replied:
"Tom's mother must have lived SOMEWHERE before he was born. With her
parents sounds like one likely possibility. I like to think that baby
Tom Marvie lived with his maternal grandparents long enough to
remember all they told him about their wonderful ancestry and his
father's bad behavior. I also like to think that they, um,
*exaggerated* how married his parents were... They must have died for
him to end up in an orphanage. Perhaps he killed them with childish
accidental magic in a fit of rage."

DuffyPoo:
"My mother died just after I was born, sir.  They told me at the orphanage she lived just long enough to name me: Tom after my father, Marvolo after my grandfather." (CoS - The Very Secret Diary)
GoF indicates that a murder occurred in Little Hangleton, at the Riddle house "half a century ago" and we learn, from Frank Bryce, that the "only person he had seen near the house on the day of the Riddles' deaths had been a teenage boy, a stranger, dark-haired and pale." Tom Riddle, according to the HP Lexicon, would be 17 at this time, and was described as having jet-black hair, although I can't find a reference to him being pale. 
"You stand, Harry Potter, upon the remains of my later father,' he [LV] hissed softly.  "...*I* killed my father." (GoF The Death Eaters) - emphasis mine
 "He left her and returned to his his Muggle parents before I was even born, Potter, and she died giving birth to me, leaving me to be raised in a Muggle orphanage." (Gof The Death Eaters)

Tom Riddle, Sr., has removed himself so far from his witch wife that he isn't even aware that the child is born or if it lived or died, I think.  He would want nothing to do with it because, "he didn't like magic, my father" and assumed the child would be magical as the mother was. I think Tom Riddle, Jr, in stating that he and HP were alike, said "both half-bloods, both orphans, raised by Muggles" because TR considered himself an orphan since he was abandoned by his father.  His father was, to him, as good as dead.  When he was of age, and out of school, he murdered his father, then he was truly an orphan.  It is odd that neither as TR, or as re-bodied LV, does he make reference to his maternal grandparents.  All he says is "I, in whose veins runs the blood of Salazar Slytherin himself, through my mother's side?"

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