Luke's HP Site

Hogwarts' Student Body

General Information

Keeping track of exactly how old a student is by age is not natural to me. For whatever reason I tend to think of school age children in terms of their class, except being from the United States, I use that education system, not the British ones. I put together a table to help with that.

Who are they

Cannon focuses on Harry’s classmates almost exclusively. Harry’s Yearmates is probably the best source for almost cannon information,1 though Secrets of the Classlist2 also contains a ton. The two disagree on a few things. Some of this has been corrected by Mrs. Rowling,3 most of it has not. In general, the latter is better researched, the former easier to find information in. Information on the class lists for pretty much any other year is entirely absent. One would think that in an age where people obsessively wiki things (myself not really excluded), someone would have compiled the available data, but if so I have not found it. Thus, I have started [this list][ClassLists], some of these people are also in the Gramps data I have extracted.

“Racial” Breakdown

One of the problems with the above sources is that I’ve ended up with 6 first generation wizards, 11 halfboods and 18 purebloods in Harry’s class. This gives me a class that is 45% pureblooded, despite Mr. Weasley being quoted as saying that purebloods are dying out, and that most families are halfblooded.4 Some of that may be the influence of the first Riddle war, where entire families were wiped out. I imagine the halfblooded families were disproportionately affected by that. One author takes it a step further, essentially counting the children of first generation witches and wizards as still being themselves culturally first generation, and accounting for nearly all the deaths.5 Still, returning to facts, if there should be about 1000 students at Hogwarts,6 then we should have 35-36 per house per year, not 40 per year total. If we had 140 students in Harry’s year, then the 18 purebloods would be only 13% of the class, and the muggleborn only 4%.

That assumes that all 116 students killed by Riddle are halfblooded (or at least that the ones that were pureblooded would be in different years), which is probably not totally true but more nearly true than not. However, there is another interesting possibility. As best I can recall, the Deathly Hallows never says what happens to the first generation wizards who should have been part of that year’s first year class. We know that some of the older ones went into hiding, some of them successfully, some not.7 On the other hand, it seems like at least some of them attended Hogwarts anyway, based on the people present in the Room of Requirement when Harry makes it there.8

Another possibility is that the Death Eaters used contacts within the Ministry of Magic’s Accidental Magic Reversal Squad or the Improper Use of Magic office to get word of under aged magic users, and to kill the muggle ones.9 If so, it is possible that they may have killed fewer of them in the years between the two Riddle wars, but not completely stopped. This would artificially deflate the number of first generation wizards not just in Harry’s year, but in all of the classes we see in the books. While Mr. Weasley’s “Muggle Protection Act” argues against this idea, it does seem believable of Umbridge and those like her who set up the laws under Pius Thicknesse’s puppet government.

  1. Mugglenet. The Revised Forty Published: 2016-03-31. Updated: 2021-05-31. last viewed 2021-06-02.↩︎

  2. Ms. Diana Summers. Secrets of the Classlist: Harry Potter and the Original Forty Classmates Copyright 2011,2014. Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.↩︎

  3. Mrs. J. K. Rowling. “The Original Forty” The J.K. Rowling Index Published: 2011-08-15. Last Viewed: 2021=09-28.↩︎

  4. Mrs. J. K. Rowling. I forget which book this is in.↩︎

  5. Bakuraptor. A Wizard’s Guide to ‘Banking’ Published: 2017-01-18. Updated: 2021-07-21. Last Viewed: 2021-10-01.↩︎

  6. Mrs. J. K. Rowling. “About the Books: transcript of J.K. Rowling’s live interview on Scholastic.com” Accio Quote 2000-10-16. Last Viewed 2020-08-17.↩︎

  7. I’m assuming that both Dean Thomas and the Death Eaters would have regarded Dean as a first generation wizard. We are told Dean did not know about his father, and if the Death Eaters did, they would have considered him a blood traitor anyway. Thus that makes at least one student who went into hiding unsuccessfully.↩︎

  8. It certainly does not mention nearly enough people coming through the portrait tunnel, and pretty much his entire class, plus both Creevy boys seem to be there. Get a citation for this.↩︎

  9. Several works have this idea, amoung them:

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