10 Things Harry Potter Fans Probably Didn't Know About Voldemort
6. His Family Has A History Of Inbreeding
In the world of Harry Potter, pureblood wizards and witches are those magic users that have two magical parents, as opposed to half-bloods or muggleborns. There aren't a huge amount of pureblood families left in the wizarding world and many of them are obsessed with maintaining this perceived purity.
And so, like many real-life royal dynasties, they turn to marrying their family members. Voldemort's wizarding lineage stems from his mother and makes him a member of the House of Gaunt, who had a particularly skin-crawling tendency to marry their cousins. This was supposedly to keep certain traits of the family alive, such as the ability to speak Parseltongue.
They also had a reputation of being very unstable individuals and by the time that the last of the lineage were born, much of the house's former wealth and prestige had been squandered.
It's yet another reason for why Lord Voldemort grew up the way he was. It's hard to argue that the deck wasn't stacked against him from the very start.