Tonks's age: A possible solution RE: [the_old_crowd] Re: Snape the Half-Blood Pr

[annemehr]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "potioncat" <willsonkmom at m...>
wrote:
>
> Eileen: 
> > 
> > Any canon I've overlooked? I've got the feeling there likely is, 
> but at
> > the moment, I'm luxuriating in my theory.
> > 
> Kathy W:
> I think there is canon that she was at Hogwarts, and she makes 
> reference to her Head of House not choosing her for Prefect, yet 
> never says who that Head of House was. Now, if Harry doesn't know 
> Cormac who is in his House and only one year older, how likely is it 
> he would know Tonks who is older, if she were in a different House? 
> Heck, for that matter, she could have been in Gryffindor.
> 
> Do I remember though, that no new Aurors had been accepted in 4 years 
> at the time Harry was talking to McGonagall? How will that work into 
> the mix?
> 
> 
> Kathy W, as good at maths as JKR is.
>

Anne:
I'm with Kathy -- Harry would never have noticed her.

McGonagall said "It's a difficult career path, Potter; they only take
the best.  In fact, I don't think anybody has been taken on in the
last three years."  Further on, she and Harry discuss aptitude tests
and then she says Auror training takes a *further* three years.  When
helping Harry pack to leave Privet Drive, Tonks told him she'd
qualified as an auror a year before, so I assume what McGonagall meant
was that, in the past three years, no one had passed the aptitude
tests to begin training.

Anyway, if Tonks is a year out of training on Harry's 15th birthday,
after three years of training, she's at least four years out of
Hogwarts (or wherever).  Since Harry has three years of Hogwarts to go
at that point, I'm afraid that does make her at least seven years
older than he is, depending when her birthday falls.  Let's say she's
22, then.

During OoP, we know Lucius Malfoy was 41 (it was quoted in a Daily
Prophet article), so he was born in 1954.

Snape was born in 1959 or 1960 (based on a chat question).  They would
indeed have had only a couple of years together in Hogwarts, then. 
For Sirius to include Bella in Snape's "gang" we don't want her to be
any older than Lucius, really.  So -- we need Andromeda to be no older
than 40 (and that's pushing it).  Unless, as Eileen pointed out, they
could be twins.

I think we're stuck with Andromeda fleeing the Black household right
after school, falling for this Tonks guy and having Nymphadora right
away.  "Nymphadora" is a name I could see an eighteen-year old giving
her daughter, anyway.

Anne