death to capslock

I'll add another possible mission to the pile, one which would require reporting to Voldemort - but only once: getting access to the Hogwarts Quill. Once Voldemort heard the prophecy, scanning the Prophet for birth announcements would be the first obvious way to check for any babies born "as the seventh month dies," but could he be sure he had found all the potential candidates? Especially since he knows that Dumbledore almost certainly knows that he knows that part of the prophecy, and could reasonably be expected to instruct his followers to keep their personal details quiet "for security reasons" (even if he didn't tell them exactly why). Best to check the impartial recorder of all British magical children, which will at least take care of the most accessible pool of Chosen One candidates. (Maybe Karkaroff started at Durmstrang originally to get access to his own region's equivalent, who knows?) However, the Hogwarts staff who have access to the Quill tend to stay at Hogwarts most of the year (some of them maybe all year, if they don't maintain a separate residence for summers and/or want to stay somewhere secure during the height of Voldemort's power), so it's hard to Imperius one of them to take a peek. Not that he couldn't have finagled a way with a little time and effort, but if he's now got an agent on site anyway...

So, get Snape to check the Quill records and meet or send a message with a list of candidates (and anything else useful he might have picked up) - and then keep his head down and wait until he gets the signal to kill Dumbledore.

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I like the idea of the quill, and it might have possibly been one of Voldy's ideas when he originally told Sev to get the DADA job. However, Voldy decided on his own which family to attack at least 5-6 months before Sev actually began teaching, and possibly even earlier than that depending on exactly when one believes Sev went to Albus to ask him to protect the Potters. So, he presumably found his potential prophecy boys in some other manner.

It IS still possible I suppose, as long as Voldy wants Sev to view the quill's list while at the castle BEFORE he actually becomes a teacher - say after an interview? Like Voldy himself did when he hid the diadem. But if that had happened, then I doubt Sev would have actually told Voldy about Harry being on the list.

Also, I'm undecided whether or not the child's name goes down at birth or at the first sign of magic. IF it's at the first sign of magic, then I can understand Voldy waiting so long to go after the Potters (a bit). But then why would Neville have ever been a possible choice? I cannot imagine his relatives trying to spook him into magic, if babyNeville had performed it already. I suppose they were trying to get him to 'unblock' himself, after the trauma of his parents?

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Tom decided on Harry over Neville before Severus had a chance to be anywhere near the quill, but what sunnyskywalker is proposing is that Tom wanted Severus to find out if there wasn't a third candidate he might choose over Harry (and wouldn't Severus be eager for this task?). Suppose Tom's original information came from St Mungo's, there could have been a third witch who gave birth that day, who like Tom's own mother was living outside of wizarding society.

As for when a child gets listed - jodel proposed that most magical children perform unintentional magic during their birth, in response to the stress.

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I've had a thought about the idea of Sev taking a peek at the 'quill' - what does it say that Sybil's job interview took place at the HogsHead? Is it possible that after Voldy's interview for the DADA job (and subsequent cursing of the position), Albus then insisted that no future interviews would take place at Hogwarts?

Not only did Sybil's interview take place off-campus, despite it being during term (not summer holidays), but she also believed upon seeing Snape, that HE was there to get a job as well (or at least to ask for an interview?) One does not usually choose a pub when holding interviews for job applicants for teaching positions in a school for children. Perhaps the location was a convenience for Albus, not Sybil. I cannot really imagine a hopeful teaching applicant suggesting the HogsHead.

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... And Aberforth is always on the watch for monkey business.

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Yes, the more I think on it, the more I question it. There's a new DADA professor every year and yet no one ever seems to know who it will be. That's seems to me to be either because Albus doesn't actually interview anyone until summer when no one else is at the castle OR because the applicant never comes up to the castle until they have the job. It seems unlikely that they could make it all the way to Albus' office and never encounter anyone. However, not impossible.

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To be fair, Lockhart was the last person to interview for the job, after that there were no willing candidates (except Severus, and he was a different story altogether) and the teachers were appointed according to the agenda de jour rather than selected.

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terri-testing.livejournal.com

Like the idea that Tom' was the last applicant alllowed onto Hogwarts grounds for his interview....

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Yes, I'm hypothesizing that once upon a time, Tom did logical things like cross-checking information. Hard to believe after seeing how he ended up, but he was supposed to be smart! He's heard of two possible prophecy babies - but what other sources might reveal another candidate or two? Tom himself was born in a Muggle institution, after all, so he of all people should know better than to discount those possibilities. A third potentially Prophecy Baby might well have been born in a Muggle hospital, or at home, etc.

And if he found out Harry and Neville's birthdates through Prophet announcements or some sort of Hall of Vital Records in the Ministry, he'd also have to consider the possibility that Dumbledore had arranged for false dates to be sent as part of a trap. That might also be the case even if the information came from St. Mungo's, so long as the informant wasn't looking at a clock at the exact minute the kids were born and could possibly be off by a few minutes. Best to find out if you're being set up, yes? If one of your followers' kids was definitely born at 12:06 AM on August 1, and Harry's name comes after that baby's on the list... well, now you know Dumbledore's plotting something, and that he doesn't know you know.

If the Quill only records names during the first recognized magical outburst, at age two or eight or whenever, this doesn't work, of course, but if you take Hagrid's statement that Harry's name has been down since he was a baby as meaning "duh, you can't train magic out of kids, they're magic since birth and we have the paperwork to prove it"* - this is Hagrid, who tends to speak imprecisely - then the Quill records would be one place Voldemort would want to check.

It might not record birthdates, but it wouldn't have to - if Voldemort knows that the Malfoys' young son Draco was born on June 5, and (say) Ernie MacMillan was born on August 8, then he could just kill all the babies between them on the list to be on the safe side.

(And come to think of it... mightn't he have done exactly that? We only have Dumbledore's word that Voldemort went to kill Harry first, when in fact we only know for certain that he went to kill Harry before Neville. Voldemort was known for killing whole families, including children. For instance, Edgar Bones and his wife and children. We never got those kids' ages, did we? Might one of them have been a baby, born on July 28, 1980? It's not like anyone but Dumbledore and Severus would find that significant: Edgar was in the Order of the Phoenix, and so everyone else would assume that he was the target and the rest of his family was just killed to inspire terror, as an afterthought. There would be no reason to think that Baby Bones was the primary target all along. After all, they didn't think Harry was the primary target either. That was James and Lily, obviously, and poor little Harry was just part of the package.)

Given the British wizarding population, I doubt there were more than three possible Prophecy Babies, and it could be that Voldemort's cross-checking revealed that there only the two he'd originally heard of after all. (Still better to know for sure, though...) If Harry's class of 40 represents the entire set of births for a year, then there shouldn't be more than about 9 births per month on average, or (rounding) about one every three days, right? Though iirc births aren't distributed evenly and there might be more in summer, and an average of every two to three days wouldn't mean the births couldn't have clustered a bit toward the end of the month by chance, so maybe four or five isn't impossible.

*Registration at birth doesn't preclude the possibility that Hogwarts refuses as official policy to tell families whether a given child is on the list until they get their Hogwarts letter, to prevent any Squibs from having "unfortunate accidents," say. Explaining why the Longbottoms weren't sure about Neville for so long in this scenario.

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Voldemort was known for killing whole families, including children. For instance, Edgar Bones and his wife and children. We never got those kids' ages, did we?

Well, we don't know if when Moody says "they got him and his family too" he speaks of Edgar, his wife and their children or Edgar, his wife and his in-laws that lived with them. But yes, there is a chance there was a small child included too. And the same for the McKinnons.

Given the British wizarding population, I doubt there were more than three possible Prophecy Babies

Unless somebody spiked the drinks at the Order Halloween party of 1979.

If Harry's class of 40 represents the entire set of births for a year, then there shouldn't be more than about 9 births per month on average, or (rounding) about one every three days, right?

40 births in 365 days is about one birth every 9 days, about 3-4 per month.

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Oh dear maths. But hey, I don't have a highly paid editor for these things and am coming down with something ;-)

I'll offer up another possibility, though: Voldemort may also have considered that the "seventh month" might be September, or the seventh month from the date of the prophecy if that happened not to be early January. So he might have killed all the babies born in those months as well, or was planning to. Just being a thorough dark lord!

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That is to say, I mean that rather than just considering it he had actually started on the project. That would take care of the "but why didn't he just..." problem: he did. Harry and Neville may have been the last two babies on the list, presumably because the Potters and the Longbottoms were the hardest to get at. (Some poor Muggleborn baby is probably recorded as a Sudden Infant Death Syndrome victim in the official coroner's report, and no one except maybe Muggle-paper-reading Dumbledore ever knew.) And he may have deliberately targeted several adults whose parents had thrice defied him back at school or something too - all those "random" killings might not have been random at all.

But maybe that's just my preference for a Voldemort who was actually clever once and has degenerated by the time we meet him.

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Of course it depends which part of the prophecy Severus delivered. If it was really the first part, Tom would be after sons or daughters of those who had defied him three times, born at the end of the 7th month under whatever interpretation (including those born prematurely), in any year. If Severus delivered the tail end of the prophecy then Tom would be after boys or girls, born at the end of the 7th month (under whichever interpretation) who were still not born when the prophecy was made, but not necessarily children of people who had defied him.

Heck, maybe the reason Harry's year is atypically small is because those are the kids that survived the purge.

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Oh, that might work! It takes care of the problems with the "baby bust" theory (like wizards not actually seeming to react to crises by delaying having children - not just the Weasleys but active Aurors like Tonks and the Longbottoms, risk-taking Gryffindors like the Potters, plus all those other elopements Molly mentioned which don't sound like they involved caution and thinking years in advance and so probably led to a few babies - and maybe this is all due to it not being the kind of war where soldiers leave home and don't have the opportunity to have babies, not any psychological difference necessarily). It would also add to the general horror of the last two years or so of Voldemort's first rise - so many families killed, even the babies! He spared no one!

With so many of the adults who would have had magical children in Harry's year being on Voldemort's enemies list anyway, maybe even Dumbledore didn't realize how many of those dead babies were actually ones Voldemort saw as potential Prophecy Babies. Especially if a quarter of them were Muggleborns and Voldemort was smart enough to just sneak in and AK them while leaving the rest of the family untouched - might not even make the Muggle news.

Come to think of it, how many Muggleborns besides Hermione and Justin do we know in that year? There ought to be around 10. Are there? That might be a good chunk of the population drop right there. Something which could easily be chalked up to either a fluke of Muggles just not having many magical kids for a couple of years or as bad luck from the DEs killing enough Muggles that by sheer bad luck, they got some of the future Hogwarts intake too.

Between that, a few halfblood kids caught when their parents took them to their Muggle relatives for a visit or were otherwise easy to get at, a few families killed all together like the Boneses may have been (attributed to them being OotP members or blood traitors or any number of reasons), and adults who otherwise might have conceived children born in Harry's year killed off before they could do so, you can account for a lot of the difference between Harry's class size and the apparent norm. Maybe you'd still need a few families putting off kids temporarily, but it wouldn't have to be as many of them.

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