[HPforGrownups] DD descendents

[manawydan]

No: HPFGUIDX 145705

Catlady wrote:
> My own desire is for Lily to be the great- or great-great grand-
> daughter of Dumbledore and his hypothetical late Muggle first wife.
> (Lily and I were born in 1950-something. My mother was born in
> 1920-something. Her mother, my grandma, was born in 1890-something.
> Her mother, my great-grandmother, died before I was born, and the
> pattern suggests she was born in 1860-something. Dumble, being 150
> years old in the 1990s, was born in the 1840s and therefore old
> enough to be a daddy in the 1860s.)

Generations in the RW are, as you rightly say, about 30 years. But, given
the longer wizarding life span (and I'm using Griselda Marchbanks as my
yardstick - she has to be in her early 200s to have examined Dumbledore in
his schooldays in the 1850s), if a wizarding generation was 30 years, and
assuming for the sake of simplicity

- everyone marries and has two children, and
- having surviving direct ancestors keeps you in touch with more distant
cousins who also descend from those ancestors

then when someone is born in the wizarding world, they have 16,254 living
relatives (including relatives by marriage), from their 128 6-times great
grandparents aged around 180 down to 4096 6th cousins 6 times removed who
are born at the same time that they are!

Canon is silent on the point, but I suspect that if that was the case, then
the WW would be far more a family/clan based society than it seems to be -
the Hogwarts students don't seem to have any more living relatives than
comparative RW students. That would suggest to me that a generation is
around 90 years in the WW to allow for the longer lifespans )obviously,
given shorter Muggle lives, a mixed marriage would have children earlier and
there would be, as in our own world, a spread of parental ages around the
average (from James and Lily, who had Harry very young, to James's own
parents, who had him very late).

hwyl

Ffred

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