How did Sirius get the Grimmauld Place? Common Law Ref.

[a_svirn]

No: HPFGUIDX 131797

> Emma:
<snip> 
> I'm sure there are lots of possible explanations for the above
> – I like a_svirn's idea of Mr and Mrs Black having an incestuous 
> marriage – but it seems to me that the easiest is that the house 
> actually was `the house of [Mrs Black's] fathers' rather than Mr
> Black's, and that Mr Black did indeed only live there for the time 
> being.
> 

a_svirn:
But my other explanation – that Mr and Mrs Black are first cousins –
does also fit the "entail theory".  If Mrs.  Black father had no male 
heirs, the heir apparent to his estate could have been his nephew (or 
other male relative on the Black side for that matter). In which case 
he could have married his daughter off to the heir apparent – a well 
known stratagem to provide for a daughter (e.g. Victoria Sackville-
West's marriage to her cousin Lionel or, since you mentioned Austen – 
the proposed match between Elisabeth and Mr. Collins). 

> The following is pure speculation, and based almost entirely on too 
> much reading of Jane Austen and George Eliot, but it also strikes me 
> as implausible that such a grand family as the Blacks seem to be 
> should have a house in a *street* with a *number* as their main 
> seat. Betcha there's a country estate somewhere, or there was,
> and Number 12 Grimmauld Place was just their house in town, brought 
> to the marriage by Mrs Black.

a_svirn:

But Jane Austen never wrote about "grand" families. Her world is a 
world of country squires the only titled gentleman in the novels being 
a paltry baronet. However, the rich Mr. Darcy does own a house in town 
on top of Pemberly. Quite possibly with a number attached to it.