Chapter 7 - Wizarding Families and Falken Family History

Another important thing to read up on was the various noble families in the magical world and how they were ranked. It was clearly written in the book book 'Nature's Nobility: A wizarding Geneoligy'.

The truly powerful families were a group of families called the sacred 28 who were considered to be truly pure blood as the people in these families had not married any half-blood or muggle born into the family yet. The families were Abbot, Avery, Black, Bulstrode, Burke, Carrow, Crouch, Fawley, Flint, Gaunt, Greengrass, Lestrange, Longbottom, Macmillan, Malfoy, Nott, Ollivander, Parkinson, Prewett, Rosier, Sewlyn, Shacklebolt, Rowle, Shafiq, Slughorn, Travers, Weasley and Yaxley. Most of these families had lost most of its magical strength due to inbreeding and were slowly dying out. Potter was not one of the sacred 28 as they married muggle borns to keep their magic strong but they still had a very high status in the Wizengamot.

The houses were categorised based on the number of years they were formed. The house which have more than 600 years of history were called Most Ancient houses. Above 400 were called Ancient houses. The houses which had more than 500,000 Galleons net worth were known as Noble houses and the houses with both history and wealth were called Ancient and Noble houses. There was also a minimum amount of ȧssets that a family needed to keep their status. Only some of the sacred 28 families were Ancient and Noble Houses. Families like Malfoy were only Noble houses who had settled down in Britain from France only some 200 years ago. but with their wit and money they had gone on to bring a lot of other families to become their vassals and had become powerful. Potter, Black, Bones, Longbottom were some examples for Most Ancient and Noble Houses. Dumbledore was just a Noble house and he had power in the government only due to his achievements. The Falken family was a Most Ancient and Noble House. Not much was written about my family in the book.

Some families had lost their powers over the years like the Weasley and Prewett families due to broken contracts and loss of money and ȧssets. Some families had become vassals to other families to keep their status in the Wizengamot after losing money over the years. This had become quite common during the recent years as many families had lost a lot of their money during the two wars. With Voldemort using the money of the Dark and Neutral families and Dumbledore using the donations from the Light families, everyone lost a lot of their ȧssets. With the loss of properties during attacks on the homes and businesses, a lot was lost.

There were many more Ancient families in the book which I had not even heard of which I guessed were wiped out completely by Grindelwald and Voldemort.

Looking at the list of families I can guess why some of the death eaters got scot free after the wars. They had too much power in the Wizengamont. With the near extinction of truly powerful political Light families, the Dark families had an upper hand in the Wizengamot. If I was Voldemort, I could have used this power to rule the wizards from behind the scenes than openly fight kind of like Malfoy is doing now. Voldemort brilliantly used this after he was resurrected in 1995 but again got blinded by the prophesy and made mistakes. If he had just gone on like that, he could have taken over the whole ministry in another year without any loss on his part. But from the fact that he had made a Horcrux in his 5th year itself, I knew that his sanity was compromised at that point. So it was possible for him to do crazy things like that.

From this I finally have an idea of families I must not offend or else I might be sent to Azkaban on trumped up charges.

I also opened my Family Grimoire and started reading up on my family history. The Falken family was had a long history. They started out as a hunter tribe and slowly grew in status. They were renowned for their strength in hunting magical beats. The family was at its peak in the 19th century and slowly lost their strength and status. The most important reason for losing the family gift during that time. It was like the metamorphmagus in Black family. The gift of Falken family was they had Mage Sight. It gave them very good eye sight plus the ability to see magic. The people with mage sight could see the magic surrounding magical buildings, wards, and they could see the magical aura of people. They could tell if a person was magical easily. Even Animagus could not hide from them. From the aura they could also sense the strength of a person.

Many people had replicated mage sight using glasses with special runes like Dumbledore but it only detected invisible magical people and did not allow people to sense magical strength or differentiate an Animagus.

The gift was hidden from others and no one other than the main family knew about this gift. It was told to the life partner only when accompanying oaths on their life and magic. It was the gift which made it possible for the Falken family to find the magical creatures quickly to hunt. The gift stopped appearing in new family members from the 18th century and after that the strength of the family was considerably reduced.

The reason for the loss of gift from what I could tell was inbreeding. The Falken family did not believe in blood supremacy and the inbreeding was caused due to the problems at that time. During the witch hunting periods, the wizards and witches had very small options on marrying due to the fear of being found out. So they could only marry between other wizarding families and slowly everyone was interrelated. This caused inbreeding and many families started losing their magical strength.

Only after losing their gift and strength did the family members start looking for new families to marry but the it did not come back till now. My mother told me to bring the family to rise from the ashes so I needed the gift. The gift needed a ritual to activate. It was performed on the family member's 7th birthday. If the ritual was successful in activating mage sight in the person's blood, then there were other benefits to it too. If the ritual was unsuccessful then only some increase in eyesight is obtained.

No one had been able to activate mage sight in two centuries. Due to the gap and my father's and mother's families not being related and due to my powerful soul due to reincarnating, I was quite hopeful in getting the gift.