Riddle family

 Riddle family

Information

Species

• Human

• Wizard

• Hybrid

Blood Status

• Muggle

• Half-Blood

Status

Extant

Family Members

• Thomas Riddle †

• Mary Riddle †

• Tom Riddle Senior †

• Merope Gaunt † (Tom Senior's Wife)

• Tom Marvolo Riddle †

• Maya Merope Riddle

Riddle was the surname of a wealthy Muggle family that lived in a manor house overlooking the village of Little Hangleton, of which they owned a great deal. They lived fairly close to the wizarding House of Gaunt. They were murdered in 1943 by Tom Marvolo Riddle.

Family History

The Riddle family was a very old Muggle family who had been established in the area around the Hangleton villages for quite some time. The family was very wealthy and owned much of the village of Little Hangleton, ruling over their lands from the handsome and large Riddle House. However, later members were known to be snobbish, arrogant, and rude.

By 1943, the members of the Riddle family were generally disliked, if not outright hated, by the villagers who lived in the area. They were also hated by the members of the House of Gaunt, an ancient pure-blood wizarding family; the Gaunts loathed Muggles on principle, but the Riddles didn't endear themselves to the Gaunts by constantly mocking their poverty and mental instability.

Tom and Merope elope

"The village of Little Hangleton enjoyed a tremendous scandal. You can imagine the gossip it caused when the squire's son ran off with the tramp's daughter, Merope."

— Explanation of how Merope was able to bewitch Tom Riddle

Around 1925, Tom Riddle Sr. had a possible lover by the name of Cecilia. Also around this time, Merope Gaunt began to have obsessive romantic feelings for him. When Morfin Gaunt discovered this, he cursed Tom with hives. He did this to make himself less appealing to his sister, as well as the general hatred of Muggles that he had.

The Gaunt men were arrested by the Ministry and were sentenced to a period in Azkaban. Afterwards, Merope either dosed Tom with Love Potion or cast the Imperius Curse on him, thereby forcing him to marry her (Albus Dumbledore speculated that the former method was more likely). The scandal that erupted in the area was quite humiliating for the Riddles, though presumably delighted the villagers who despised them.

When Merope became pregnant, she ceased bewitching Tom, believing that he had come to genuinely love her, or would at least stay with her for the benefit of their child. Unfortunately, neither proved true; upon regaining his free will, Tom, having felt like he awoke from a nightmare, fled from Merope and returned to his family home. What reception he received was unknown, though his parents at least seemed to believe his tales that he'd been hoodwinked by Merope. Tom never spoke of the truthful circumstances for fear of being thought mad. Merope, alone in London, managed to find Wool's Orphanage, where she gave birth to twins, a son and a daughter. Shortly thereafter, Merope died due to childbirth complications, having lost the will to live. Before her death, she asked that the babies be named Tom Marvolo Riddle, for his father and grandfather, and Maya Merope Riddle, for her namesake.

The younger Tom and Maya then spent the first eleven years of their lives in the orphanage, completely unaware of the existence of the Wizarding world, although unusually aware of their magical ability for children not born in it. In 1938, Tom Riddle's future enemy, Albus Dumbledore, revisited the orphanage to inform the Riddle siblings of their acceptance into Hogwarts. Immediately after this, Riddle became convinced that his father was a Wizard and that his mother was a Muggle out of the belief that the latter could not have died if she were a witch.

Upon entering the school, Riddle's siblings became concerned with learning about his heritage and began painstaking research on his father's name before eventually realizing that he had never set foot in Hogwarts. After being forced to accept that his father was a Muggle and his mother a witch, Voldemort began to detest his given name. With only his middle name, "Marvolo," to go on, which he knew from the orphanage was his maternal grandfather's name, Tom began researching through an old book of wizarding families and learned of the surviving Gaunt line. After learning of his descent from Hogwarts co-founder Salazar Slytherin, Riddle became interested in pure-blood supremacy and the Dark Arts. In particular, Riddle became obsessed with immortality and the creation of Horcruxes. In the summer of his sixteenth year, he set out for Little Hangleton to find his relatives.

This would provide an unstable mixture for Riddle's adult personality and lead to terrible events that would shape the history of the wizarding world for decades to come.