Fans of Alternity

I like your idea that it is magically updated so that what it contains cannot, perhaps, be controlled by McGonagall. Otherwise, one would think that the general enrollment census would not contain information she wishes to keep secret from the Lord Protector.


I would imagine that if she could, McGonagall would keep a "double set of books," as it were.

So why can't she?

And.

If the Hogwarts enrollment list updates magically -- and if the Ministry wants to monitor that information -- why wouldn't the book have a magical double in the Ministry's archives? Or why wouldn't that information appear in whatever population census the Ministry *does* surely keep?

I guess I have difficulty with the notion that the Order has managed to insert Muggle-born children undetected into wizarding foster families without the real parentage appearing automatically in the Ministry's records -- especially if there's some enrollment book at Hogwarts that can't be prevented from recording that same true information. In other words, if McGonagall can't keep the true biographical information for those students out of a book she has in her own keeping, how can the Order possibly have kept it out of the Ministry's census records? --

Because the game says so, perhaps, but I'd love to see them work out this wrinkle if it is one.


Is there more to be inferred about the book and the information it contains?

1. It is not a new issue:

It seems that Malfoy has asked in the past to see the book (http://alt-mcgonagall.livejournal.com/1242.html?thread=4314#t4314) and that McGonagall may have deflected his request. This time he didn't even ask. (Perhaps he has too many other irons in the fire, what with personally vetting Prophet articles, attending to matters of the Wizengamot, looking over the shoulders of Magical Law Enforcement, taking meetings with all and sundry, and dropping in at Hogwarts to snoop and pressure take tea with his son and the Lord Protector's.)


2. If the problem is that it contains information that would reveal a student's true parentage, it can't have been an issue of long-standing:

If the book contains information about Hogwarts students, I'd expect this might be the first year for which the presence of fostered Muggleborn students would be an issue. Presumably the practice began no earlier than 1981 (when the Potters were killed) as book canon instructs us that while Voldemort had supporters within the government and its agencies, he was not in control of the Ministry and was certainly not then the Lord Protector. Perhaps we can imagine that a few of the fostered children were older than Harry Potter, but it must be difficult to secretly place children into families once they are older than toddlers. (And even then you'd think neighbours and acquaintances would have noticed save in the case of a wizarding family that lived in greatest isolation from other magical people.)

So, at most, we might think that they might have needed to worry last year and perhaps the year previous about Malfoy's demand to see the book?

I can live with this explanation of the bits and pieces, but it still somehow feels as if there are pieces that strain or pieces I'm not seeing.