James's parents' generation ( Was: someone else being right / James's parents)

[Carol]

No: HPFGUIDX 182515

Potioncat:
> That would be true if there was a back story, but there wasn't. If
she had given us more information about the senior Potters, she would
need to give us more about the Evans family. It would be harder to
keep information about young Severus out of it.
<snip> 
> JKR anchored much of her plot to the DD and Snape arcs. James and 
Lily  were the characters that things happened to, rather than the
ones moving the story. So I can't imagine JKR would have had too much
to say about their parents.

Carol responds:

I agree with the last paragraph in particular, but I still think that
the deaths of both sets of parents are a rather irritating little
authorial convenience. JKR wanted them out of the way so that Harry
would have no relatives except Petunia. Since she also killed off
Sirius's parents (at least his mother gets page time as a drooling,
screaming old madwoman in a portrait) and probably Severus's parents,
too, since they're not mentioned after he goes to school, I think she
could concentrate on Harry's and his parents' generations
--specifically HRH, Draco, the Weasley and Malfoy families, the
surviving Marauders, and Snape (Dumbledore being a major exception,
several generations removed from any other important character).

To return to JKR's killing off of Harry's grandparents' generation,
Walburga Black and her husband, Orion, weren't really all that old if
the Black family tapestry is accurate (sixty and fifty respectively at
their deaths, and neither were James's parents if they were Charlus
and Dorea (Black) Potter (she died at 57; he was probably about the
same age--Sirius wouldn't have been able to spend much time with them
since Mrs. P. died in 1977), but, oh, well. JKR isn't concerned with
such matters. Or maybe she thinks that fifty-plus is "old," even for
wizards? Can't be; how would she explain McGonagall, much less the
Dumbledores and Madam Marchbanks, if that's the case? (I do hope that
she revises the family tree to make the Potters, if those are James's
parents, and Sirius's parents actually old--and to eliminate the
teenage fathers--before putting it in her encyclopedia!)

Sidenote: The tree shows links to a number of Pure-Blood familes, not
just the Potters, Malfoys, and Lestranges, but the Longbottoms, the
Crouches, the Prewetts (Molly Weasley's family), the McMillans (I
thought it was Macmillan in the books, but I could be wrong), the
Bulstrodes (which means that Sirius Black is related, if not very
closely, to Millicent Bulstrode, a Slytherin girl in Harry's year),
the Burkes (Caractacus Burke was the tight-fisted co-owner of Borgin
and Burkes who gave Merope ten galleons for Slytherin's locket), the
Yaxleys (the brutal-faced DE is a Yaxley), and the Rosiers (Evan
Rosier, killed by Mad-Eye Moody after GH, was also a DE). Phineas
Nigellus married a Flint (some distant relation of Marcus?) and
Sirius's maternal grandmother was a Crabbe! I guess those last
half-dozen connections, along with cousins Bellatrix and Narcissa,
explain why Sirius doesn't like to look at the tapestry. At any rate,
I find the connections more intriguing than the dates, which are
probably, erm, in need of revision.

However, what I really want to know (to return to the original topic
of the Potters and Evanses) is how the Muggle Evanses, Petunia and
all, got onto Platform 9 3/4 in Severus Snape's memory of himself and
Lily at age eleven ("The Prince's Tale").

Carol, noting that Orion Black died in 1979, the same year as his
younger son, Regulus, and wondering whether he died of grief (and BTW,
shouldn't the year of Reggie's death be 1980 if it's "some fifteen
years before" Harry looks at the tapestry in August 1995 in OoP?)