Amazing Ancestry
By Cia
This month, it's all about the bloodlines. And who keeps their bloodlines better than everybody else? That's right - our esteemed Purebloods, members of the Sacred Twenty-Eight.
You can see the whole Black family on the Black Family Tapestry, and you can know about all the Malfoys straight from their own mouths. But there are some families that keep their bloodlines confidential, so that all knowledge about them is vague. In this article, I have interviewed the descendants of three Pureblood families to dig up their ancestral secrets. Enjoy!
First up - Bulstrode. Not much is known about them except two of their members - Millicent Bulstrode and Violetta Black (nee Bulstrode). The physically intimidating Millicent turned out to also be mentally intimidating (a sharp one, she is), as she recognised at once that I was from the press. She said, and I quote, that her "bloody family had enough bloody business without people trying to bloody ruin us". It took quite a long time of persuading (and a promise of introducing her to a senior Ministry official) before she agreed to tell us about her family. In Britain, the Bulstrode name was no longer extant in the male line, but Millicent grudgingly admitted that she had some distant relatives whom she had no connections with (that she re-emphasised again and again), in Australia. One of their ancestors had been obsessed with mud, he would wear nothing and smear mud on himself, build mud forts and even drink mud, thus he was banished to the foreign land with his wife and children. But one thing that might surprise you - the Bulstrodes are no longer Pureblood! Millicent herself is merely a half-blood. Apparently, the blood traitor had been disowned, his name never to be spoken again. Said wizard had been an adventure-seeker, foolishly falling in love with a snobby Muggle circus performer. So he secretly took his whole inheritance, traded them into Muggle money and renounced magic to spend his life with her. He died one week later. Some say that his sister Violetta, killed him in cold blood to avenge the family name.
The Crouch name has been in the mud since Bartemius Crouch Jr. became a Death Eater, impersonated Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody and tried to kill Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived. Even more sadly, it has become extinct when Crouch Sr. was murdered and Crouch Jr. was subjected to the Dementor's Kiss. You think the Bartemius-es were bad? You should know about their ancestors. Enter Caspar and Charis Crouch. Their marriage was based on a dare and a bet. In the journal of a close friend of the Crouches, it was stated that: "Caspar Crouch loved to play the extremely cruel and barbaric Game of Dares. For every dare completed, the prize was the life of one, or in some cases, several Muggles. The dares included breaking hearts, humiliating Muggleborns in public, cursing blood traitors, having duels to death, etc., and I could go on and on about the gory details, but I won't." Caspar was dared to seduce Charis, who fell in love with him. Her sisters knew that he would soon get tired of her and break her heart, so they bet her that she would never be able to have a better husband than they did. Charis, being the competitive person she was, used all sorts of tactics to secure Caspar as her husband, even resorting to Dark methods. Luckily, not all Crouches were problematic - the grandfather of Barty Crouch Sr. was perfectly normal and ordinary - except for the fact that he had a tendency to count every red thing he came across. (That would have been an extremely serious problem had he been Sorted into Gryffindor.)
Remember the weedy Slytherin student Theodore Nott? I bet you do. Remember any other Notts except his father? I bet you don't. Theodore wasn't so skinny when I visited him some time ago - in fact, he had gotten rather attractive. But I digress. I got a similar reaction from him as Millicent, except that he used a lot more expletives while rejecting me. However, this reporter can be very persuasive when she wants to be, and was finally granted an interview. It was rumoured that one of his ancestors, Cantankerus Nott was the author of the Pureblood Directory, but Theodore snorted and said that it was complete nonsense. Cantankerus was an idiot who was obsessed with power, he said, but he was an idiot. He couldn't write such a complex book. It was actually written by his daughter, who had nothing else to do because he locked her in her room to keep her secure as a bride for the Pureblood family who would offer the best connections. Just like a twisted fairytale. Why would Cantankerus' daughter write a directory for Purebloods? We'll never know.
After these two interviews, I went on to interrogate several more wizards and witches, who all drove me from their homes with horrible curses. I hope you entertained yourself with this article that I risked my life on, my dear readers!
Ciao!
Cia
*WARNING: All information above is entirely and completely fictional, and may or may not be true*