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Family History

The Nott family first appears in record in the year 1085, after the Norman conquest of Britain, in the Domesday Book, something that Theodore believes is “nothing in particular to brag about.” Theuderic Nott, the first recorded of the family, is listed as a farmer and land owner, but he also was a member of the Cornish Warlock Council, and signed its Charter of Intermagical Cooperation in the year 1106. (This, on the other hand, impresses Theodore greatly, for Theuderic Nott, head of the Cornish Warlock Council, is important enough to have been mentioned in his history textbook, instead of just tax records, which included everyone.)

The presence of the Notts in Cornwall is a matter of public record through the Dark Ages. Many members of the family headed the Cornish Warlock Council, and Nott Castle (built with the use of magic in 1073) was informally regarded as the most important building in wizarding Corwall throughout most of the Middle Ages. They would claim that the famous King Mark of Cornwall of Arthurian legend was both a wizard and their ancestor. The Nott family began hiring a record keeper in 1200, and it was at this time that their family tree and interactions (or lack of marriage with and exploitation) with Muggles were originally developed. By this point in time, the family had amassed a vast fortune. The Nott Castle was home to the largest wizard library in Southern Britain until 1543, when the structure was burnt to the ground by Muggles seeking revenge for a “sorcery induced” plague that had wiped out the nearby town of St. Agnes. The Nott family tree was one of the few material possessions to survive the blaze.

A manor home was erected on the same property later that year, and the building and its grounds (known “unpretentiously” as the Nott Estate) are still the primary residence of the Nott family. Though very locally oriented and quite “Cornish” in regional identity, the Notts are oft-regarded as one of the most important families in England.

The Nott family is, in its history, most notable for its perseverance. Though Alphonse Nott constantly worries that the Nott family will end with Theodore either a) dying of a fever because he’s too thin or b) running off with the family money to marry a Muggleborn and disgrace the family name forever, the Notts have survived far worse than Theodore. They recovered after countless economic hardships, have scratched dozens of blood traitors from their family trees, and have even married first cousins to keep the blood pure. It cannot be claimed that their origins are modest, however. As far as historians can tell, even before written records were kept through most of Britain, they were one of the most powerful families in the West Country, lauding power over Muggles because they held the mysteries to magic, and therefore religion. When the islands became Christian in the Middle Ages, they adapted, and used their previously influential positions to keep control of land.

Notts have been involved in many different industries throughout the years. Throughout the Middle Ages, they acted as feudal lords in North Cornwall, using the local fear of the family to keep serfs and the general population under control. When the feudal system began to decline, they bought many tin mines throughout the West Country, some of which they still own, even though the mines are no longer as profitable as they were. Starting before the invention and wide-spread use of Floo Powder beginning in the fourteenth century, they controlled a large amount of the wizard shipping industry. For years, though Nott Castle was located in St. Agnes, their secondary seat was in Plymouth. They were so influential in Plymouth, in fact, that one of the main streets of the town is called “Notte Street” to this day.

With all of their investments and control of various sets of the wizard British economy, the Nott family was extremely successful up until the beginning of the twentieth century, when the shipping and tin mining industries began to fall out of favour. Fortunately, the head of the family at the time, Edward Nott, was wise enough to curb spending, and they retained most of their wealth. Though the family does still have some holdings in shipping and tin mining, as well as many in Cornish agriculture, they now seek financial independence in whatever field they choose. Theodore’s father, for instance, is an investment banker through Gringotts.

Parental History

Born at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 1930, the birth of Alphonse Ophiuchus Nott was believed to signify the beginning of a new era in the wizarding world, or at least, that’s what the boy’s parents thought. It was a dramatic birth, that of Alphonse Nott, and his parents believed that this signified that he would lead a dramatic life (which he would, though perhaps not in the manner they intended). He was, indeed, an important baby, most people thought, the product of two of the finest examples of members of two of the finest pureblooded families in England. His father, Simon Nott, was out of the country on “business” in Austria at the time, but his mother, Aludra, did her part to make the birth of Alphonse seem significant, naming him for two members of his distant family and soon showing him off at all of the parties she could.

Fifteen years her husband’s junior (he was thirty-seven, she was twenty-two), Aludra Nott was an unhappy woman, much like Theodore’s mother would be, and was never a significant force in her son’s life, for the woman, a beautiful, upstanding pureblooded lady, promptly handed her son off to nannies and went back to her previous life of elegant soirees and shopping parties with her friends. Many would point to Aludra Nott and say that she was an example of a long history of mental illness in Theodore’s family, for most of her friends described her as “a singularly unhappy woman, selfish to the core and never appeased.” She wanted absolutely nothing to do with her son or her husband, was inclined to sexual sadism and frequent shopping sprees where she would spend tens of thousands of galleons in one trip. Of course, with her husband frequently out of the country selling Dark Objects and running about with Dark wizards and without anyone who cared much to check up on her in the don’t-ask-don’t-tell atmosphere of the upper crust wizarding society of the 1930s, she was hardly much of a scandal-causer until her death in January of 1935, when she overdosed on sleeping potion while Simon was in Hogsmeade on a Very Important Business Function. The exact cause of Aludra Nott’s death is debated to this day, for the Ministry could never quite determine whether or not the woman poisoned herself accidentally or on purpose. (Her death is officially listed as an accident, however, a suicide note was found amongst her notes, but as it was written approximately three months before her death, it could never be determined as to whether she had intended to kill herself or not). Far from distraught over his wife’s death, Simon nevertheless pulled out of much of his business dealings and Alphonse was sadly raised without a mother, though his half-blooded served more as a maternal figure than Aludra Nott ever would have.

Alphonse entered Hogwarts a few years behind the charming, successful Head Boy who would eventually become known as Lord Voldemort. Secretly espousing blood purity and taking of action rather than rhetoric, then-Tom Riddle became an automatic source of admiration for Alphonse, who managed, despite being somewhat younger, to worm his way into Riddle’s inner circle. Disappointment struck when Riddle fell off the face of the earth after leaving Hogwarts, but when he returned as Lord Voldemort in the 1950s, Alphonse’s relationship with him during school meant that he quickly became one of the most trusted of his followers (though never quite the Dark Lord’s ‘slippery friend,’ like Lucius Malfoy, perhaps because although he was intelligent and quite a capable wizard, he was of poorer health and of fewer abilities to actually manipulate people). Pressure quickly rose for him to marry, especially from his father (hypocritical of Simon Nott, seeing as the man did not marry until he was thirty-five, but that is beside the point), and he after much deliberation chose Mireille Wilkes, a shy socialite whom he had met at the Travers' New Year's Eve Party and the older sister of a fifteen-year-old boy who would eventually become his fellow Death Eater, Ferdinand Wilkes.

Mireille, as previously mentioned, was something of an odd choice for Alphonse, who was quite different from the typical pureblood, a quiet and reserved girl. At the time that Alphonse proposed, Mireille was nineteen years old (he was twenty-five) and had been living with her parents after leaving school. Alphonse’s proposal was met with much enthusiasm from the Wilkes household, even Mireille, who was initially wary of the idea of marriage at all, but was sincerely enamoured of Alphonse, and by the time that the two actually married in December of 1975, the couple was very much in love.

Mireille and Alphonse moved into a the Nott Estate in Cornwall, and were relatively happy and undisturbed for a short amount of time, though it is important to note that happy is a bit of an overstatement, as Alphonse spent most of his time running about the country, doing Voldemort’s dirty work, and Mireille, feeling cast off by what few friends she had (who tended to be of a lesser caliber than her and unwed) by her marriage to Alphonse, sank quickly back into the solitary depression she had experienced while living with her parents. Picking up on this, both Simon Nott and Mireille’s family, felt that a melancholy Mireille was not going to do anyone any good, and Simon, retired from the Dark Objects business, was feeling interfering, and felt that the perfect solution to this problem was for Mireille to produce an heir. Nevermind that giving birth would likely do as much harm as help to Mireille’s fragile psyche, it seemed a practical idea, and besides, the two would be having children eventually, why not get at it as soon as possible? The two began trying to conceive in the later part of 1976, and by January of 1977, Mireille was pregnant, much to the elation of both sides of the family (with the exception of Mireille’s older sister, Beatrice, who was beginning to suspect that she was infertile, and was jealous of her tiny little sister, who conceived so easily). Mireille herself seemed to be quite happy about the situation, and for a while, she even seemed happy about life in general.

It soon became apparent, however, that although she had conceived easily, Mireille’s body (a mere five feet one inches tall and bordering on one hundred pounds, not to mention small breasted and boyishly hipped) was not well-suited for pregnancy and that her poor mental health had taken its toll on her physical well-being, and she was quite weak and ill-looking. Her mother suggest that the best way to remedy this was through several different sorts of potions that helped to strengthen the body while carrying a child. No one seemed to be averse to the idea, so Mireille went about ordering the proper potions and such. However, a mix-up at the apothecary resulted in the woman being sent a potion meant to kill cancer cells instead of a strengthening potion. Obviously, when she took the incorrect potion, the results were disastrous, and Mireille not only lost the baby she was four months into carrying, but nearly was killed.

Of course, this event, deemed a tragedy by the woman’s family, garnered quite a bit of press at the time, what with the frequent tales of desperation and tragedy pouring in from all corners of Britain with the first war. It is probably safe to say that the wizarding public was glad to hear of non-Voldemort-related misfortunes, sick as it may seem. The ensuing lawsuit also inflated the Nott family fortune quite a bit, though none of these things would even mildly satisfy Mireille. It is not surprising that she fell back into one of her “moods” as she spent six months recovering from the accident, though at this point in time, it was clear that her depression was more than her usual out-of-place sadness. The woman was truly distraught out of her mind, and all of the men in her life (her husband, father-in-law, and brother) seemed to think that she was merely upset to have lost her child, evidence of how truly unsympathetic Theodore’s family can be, for Alphonse seemed to be completely naïve to the idea that his wife may be upset over the loss of her physical health as well, and that she was already in an extremely fragile state of mind. After she had made a full physical recovery, Alphonse began to talk of conceiving another child - perhaps not completely out of the idea the it would make his wife happy, but also out of fear that she might be barren post-accident, or that, without some coercion would spend the rest of her life lying in bed, weeping and reading about astronomy (always her favorite subject in school), which made her a useless sort of wife. It also came from the man’s genuine compassion for his wife - he did care for the woman and wanted her to be happy. He was, much like with his son, completely unaware of what would make her happy.

Fortunately for all of us, Healers had been able to restore Mireille more or less to her original state of health before the potion-taking, for otherwise, no one would be reading this history, as Theodore Nott would not exist. But, as it was, after a very tumultuous 1978, the boy was conceived in mid-February of 1979. Unlike the first pregnancy, Mireille seemed to be almost saddened by this, and cautious. Her husband, however, was pumped up with pride, seeing this baby as the way to set everything right - an heir, a distraction for his wife, and tangible proof their his relationship with his wife was, in fact, stable (there had been previous speculation in high society that Mireille had always been an unsuited wife for Alphonse, and that the two were about to separate). Of course, this didn’t last long, for Mireille spent most of her pregnancy in solitude, sitting in her bedroom, which she decorated much like Professor Trelawny’s classroom at Hogwarts, swathed in red, heavily incensed, and hot. Her interest in the movements of the planets also turned less from a scientific exactation to Divination, and some of her friends claim that she spent most of her time in the last months of her pregnancy attempting to predict her own death. Her brother, Ferdinand, was especially worried of this, and told her “incense and gloom are no good for babies - you’re not merely taking your refusal to be happy out on yourself and your husband, but your innocent child. This is asking for problems.” And maybe it was.

Her water broke nevertheless on Halloween of that year, a full three weeks before she was supposed to give birth. It was a long, difficult labor, and Alphonse Nott, unexpecting of the birth so soon, had to be called away from a favor to Voldemort in Leeds to be with his wife. Mireille refused the aid of any painkilling charms, naturally untrusting of healing charms after her first mishap. Though there was some initial worry that the baby might have been breeched, a boy was born without much complication nearly forty-eight hours later, at 9:45 at night on November 2, 1979. The boy’s mother collapsed from exhaustion soon after, and his proud father chose what he thought was an appropriate name - Theodore Callistus - meaning “god’s beautiful gift” or some variation thereof (he wasn’t arrogant at all, was he?). And so the life of Theodore Nott began, three weeks early (his mother was distraught that the boy was going to be a moody Scorpio instead of an amiable, athletic Sagittarius as she had hoped) and on a cold, sunny November day, when the dead were rumoured to rise spiritually from their graves and feast with the living.

Childhood

Mireille recovered with surprising speed from the delivery. She once again seemed happy, beaming and caring for her son personally, atypical of Pureblooded witches. She described baby Theodore as her light, and he was possibly the most pampered baby in all of England. Alphonse began spending more time at home, and less time torturing Muggles and plotting the deaths of Ministry officials. The man seemed genuinely fond of his son, if not his wife. Simon liked the child as well. Even as a baby, Theodore was clearly intelligent and active.

And so Mireille, Alphonse, and their son lived in relative happiness for eight months, until the early morning of August 4, 1980. Mireille had been suffering from a bout of insomnia, and had left her bedroom for her second favorite room in the house-- the library. What exactly transpired there is still unknown, but investigative reports ruled her death an accident. It seemed that she had slipped off of the ladder used to access higher bookshelves and snapped her neck.

So Theodore would be motherless, a fact the impact of which he still does not completely understand. Raised entirely by his father and nanny in Cornwall, Theodore was always a quiet child to say the least. He had already begun to speak around the time that his mother died, but as soon as he established the ability, he promptly seemed to decide that he didn’t want to talk, at all. His nanny often professed that he believed the boy to be mute. While this wasn’t true, for years he was painfully shy, to the point of being rude. Much of the time, when spoken to, Theodore simply would not respond, even though by nodding or shaking his head, he would make it clear that he understood perfectly fine that he understood - he never knew what to say.

The only person with whom Theodore was willing to converse openly was his father - unlike his nanny, Alphonse always made the boy feel as though his opinion were intelligent and worthwhile. Although he was highly critical of everything the boy did (including an incident when he was four and his father criticized his tendency to draw the letter s backwards which Theodore still remembers), he also offered praise, and told his son that he was proud of him, something that he never heard from his nanny.

After her learned at the age of four, reading became one of Theodore’s favourite activities. He gobbled up books the way that most children of his age enjoy sweets or playing running games. For years his favourite book was the dictionary - he was eager to learn and looked up everything he didn’t understand. His father, impressed by his love of reading and eagerness to learn new things, highly suspected that the reticent boy would be Sorted into Ravenclaw, especially after he requested to have his bedroom painted navy blue, an idea which he did not enjoy.

He spent most of his childhood alone, being an only child. There was only one other wizard family in St. Agnes, but their children, the Persings, were all five years minimum older than Theodore and were halfbloods, anyway, so he never played with them. His father, also an only child, had disliked the solitude and isolation of the estate, and in what most would consider an act of kindness, he attempted to introduce Theodore to other pureblooded children his age. Of course, the boy was too quiet to make close friends with any of the loud, bratty children, and so he remained alone. He was never as indulged or spoiled as Pansy Parkinson or Draco Malfoy - Alphonse Nott had never seen fit to give his son anything he asked for, and it wouldn’t be until years later that any of them would be able to bond over the mutual high expectations they felt that they had to meet.

As it was, Theodore didn’t mind the solitude. He was, during his childhood, close to his father, who, though many would consider his relatively distant persona, criticism of the boy’s foibles and failures, and reluctance to discuss his mother as cruel and far from ideal parenting, compared to the constant bereavement he received from his nanny, was friendly and supportive.

Theodore was, for the first eleven years of his life, what some people would call a “problem child.” Many would be surprised by this, seeing as his favourite activity was (and still is) reading, a fairly non-threatening activity. However, young Theodore, though not particularly clumsy, was accident-prone. From the time that he learned to ride a broom, he was almost constantly found falling off of it. Being natives of Cornwall, the Notts had always been supporters of the Falmouth Falcons. With a favourite Quidditch team whose motto was "Let us win, but if we cannot win, let us break a few heads,” Theodore soon learned that getting tossed around was part of flying. Either because of this sentiment or from sheer stubbornness (a quality also displayed in his young insistence upon looking up every word which he did not know in the dictionary for complete understanding of whatever he was reading), he was undeterred from flying by his falls, and even for a time dreamed of being a professional Quidditch player (a lofty goal for a boy who, at the age of eight, stood inches short of four feet tall). His accidents frustrated his father, but it would be strange to have a son who did not play Quidditch, so he endured fixing his son up after three concussions, eight bone fractures (including one break so severe that the bone broke through the skin and left a scar on his right arm that he still has today - Theodore and the bone specialist at St. Mungo’s were on a first-name basis) and countless bumps, bruises, and abrasions, all within a matter of five years.

He almost drowned when he was six, when a wave in the North Atlantic knocked him over and the tiny boy was unable to reemerge. His father pulled him out of the ocean and a Muggle who happened to be jogging on the beach at the time performed CPR, much to his distrusting of Muggle medicine father’s chagrin. After a fall from a horse at the Wilkes home at the age of nine, he developed a terrible fear of horses. The most traumatic event of his childhood was, however, an incident that occurred when he was ten. Alphonse Nott had gone away on business for a weekend, and Theodore was left alone with his nanny. This was not completely unusual, and generally, the two ignored each other as much as it was possible for a nanny to ignore her charge. However, halfway through the week, his rarely-seen paternal grandfather decided to stop in for a visit, and, upon finding Theodore’s nanny lazily sunning outside instead of watching his grandson in the garden, flew into a fit of rage. Attracted by the noise of the two arguing, Theodore emerged from where he had been flying in time to see his grandfather strangle his nanny in anger.

The death was covered up easily enough. The Ministry of Magic was reluctant to stir trouble in its post-Voldemort bliss, especially involving a family with as much influence and connection as the Notts. Thus, the murder, which Simon orchestrated to look like a fall down the stairs, was never fully investigated as anything more than a tragic accident. Upon returning from his business trip, Alphonse Nott already assumed that his father had committed a crime of passion. His normally reticent son’s complete retreat into quiet and solitude seemed to confirm that Theodore had witnessed the murder take place. Unsure of what to do and reluctant to implicate his father in a crime that would land him in Azkaban, Alphonse chose not to address the issue. So, Theodore never spoke of what he saw take place, not knowing what to say. The incident is the only topic which he outright refuses to talk about.

Theodore’s relationship with his grandfather, never ideal, took a significant turn for the worst after the death of the servant, and Theodore retreated to simply talking to and spending time with his father. His grandfather returned to retirement in France and Alphonse didn’t bother hire another nanny, seeing as he was soon going to attend…

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

Year One (1991-1992)

Theodore arrived at Hogwarts with all of the nervousness and optimism of a typical eleven-year-old, though he may have been better at hiding it than most. (He appeared indifferent to the whole affair.) His father sent him off with more advice than he thought he could ever possibly make use of. The main piece that he remembered (and never really followed): make friends, not enemies, even of “mudbloods.” After forty-five seconds of agonizing uncertainty, he was Sorted into Slytherin. (The Hat gave a generous amount of consideration to Ravenclaw, but it seemed to ultimately decide that he was much better suited to Slytherin.) His dormmates Draco Malfoy, Vincent Crabbe, and Gregory Goyle automatically became inseparable, and the girls banded together, but Theodore, left with Blaise Zabini, whom he did not get along well with, found himself relatively alone. He was indifferent enough to the situation, as he was used to being alone at home in Cornwall, but still found himself lonely for his home and for the company of people who he didn’t find stupid, immature, and irritating (namely, his father). He threw himself into his studies - or gave the impression of doing so. Theodore spent the majority of his first five years at Hogwarts reading - (though not in the library - he wasn’t quite that geeky). No upper years made any effort to befriend him, which was really just as well, and he eventually earned a reputation for being freakishly reticent. In other words, the years that his father had spent coaxing him into being a talkative, good conversation-maker were automatically reversed. His end of school reports indicated that his professors believed him to be a very bright and capable student whom they wished would speak out in class more. Despite his solitude, and his initial loneliness, he looks back upon his first year as one of a positive nature.

Year Two (1992-1993)

By September of 1992, Theodore’s father was already speaking of “trouble times at Hogwarts,” but after a summer with his overbearing grandfather at the Nott Estate, the twelve-year-old boy was more than anxious to return to the solitude and scholarship of Hogwarts. The “bad business” involving the petrification of muggleborns and the Chamber of Secrets prompted the most intimate communication between Theodore and Alphonse they have ever had. His father was very good at being cryptic, but heavily implied that he was privy to what was going on, and lectured him frequently that, though petrifying students may seem like something gruesome and awful to do, because they were muggleborns, their pain was excusable in order to further the idea that they should not be allowed to study at Hogwarts. Theodore had long been aware that his father and grandfather were involved in the Dark Arts, and he far from missed Hermione Granger’s irritating presence in his Potions class, but to be perfectly honest, the idea of killing someone, “mudblood” or no, was rather disgusting to him. Besides, why would they bother with petrifying someone who was at least intelligent, like Hermione Granger, when Crabbe and Goyle were dumb and useless as rocks and pureblooded? Needless to say, he was quite glad when the violence and distractions from his studies came to an end.

Year Three (1993-1994)

The hullabaloo over Sirius Black’s escape from Azkaban far from bothered Theodore (now officially a teenager), as he deduced from his father’s comments and obvious disdain of the man that he was far from a threat to his safety. If he was going to kill Harry Potter, well… Merlin bless him. The new talk of the fallen Voldemort, however, did arouse Theodore’s interest in what had happened in the 1970s. What he knew as of then was very little, that the Dark Lord had been a great and powerful leader, that he had had a fantastic and broad-sweeping vision for the purity of the world, and that he had been thwarted in 1981 by a baby, (his outstandingly ordinary classmate) Harry Potter. After hours scouring the library and three thorough readings of A Modern History of Wizard Britain, he came to two conclusions. One: the Dark Lord was a quack and two: Even if he hadn’t been, the violence caused by the war was unnecessary and orgiastic. This personal struggle with coming to terms with the idea that he disagreed so strongly with his father was the main cornerstone of his third year at Hogwarts.

Year Four (1994-1995

Though many of his classmates were extremely excited about the presence of the Triwizard Tournament, Theodore personally found the whole affair to be a gigantic frivolity orchestrated by the Department of Intermagical Cooperation to mask more serious problems plaguing the Ministry of Magic. He watched the events, of course, and supported Cedric Diggory (though he was never clique-ish enough to wear a “Support Cedtric Diggory, The REAL Higwarts Champion” badge, he thoroughly enjoyed the “Potter Stinks” badge sitting on his nightstand for half a year), but was relatively uninterested in the whole affair. He had his first “date” that Christmas, when he attended the Yule Ball with [a friend], but considering the fact that they were only friends and didn’t even attempt to pretend otherwise, it was a relatively uneventful happening in his life.

Of course, Diggory’s death and the return of Voldemort changed his perspective on disinterest, and though most people widely denied the return of the Dark Lord, upon returning home from Hogwarts in June, his father confirmed, more or less, that this was true. Rather shocked and frightened by this news, Theodore decided that summer that settling into a nice, uncomplicated denial like the rest of the wizarding world was the best option he had.

Year Five (1995-1996)

The first immediate disappointment during Theodore’s fifth year was not being appointed prefect. Not that he expected to be - alright, he did expect to be appointed prefect. His grades were better than Malfoy’s, and he had always been better behaved and less disrespectful. He also thought that having any actual authority wouldn’t do Malfoy any good, and was right, and was rather disgusted at being looked over. He had a feeling that Draco Malfoy’s appointment had something to do with either his more sociable personality or his father’s influence, which he found to be very unfair, considering that he thought it said something for his character that he had no desire for his father to push the position for him, and had told him so.