Magic was not the only remarkable thing about the wizarding world. Its family ties were just as extraordinary.
As the oldest and most distinguished pure-blood family in England, the Black family was one that other pure-blood families took pride in marrying daughters from.
After a thousand years of intermarriage, their relationships were impossible to untangle. They could claim kinship with practically anyone.
Going back just five generations along Shawn's direct line, his great-great-great-grandfather Phineas had married a daughter of the Flint family.
Yes, that was the same Flint whom Shawn regularly slaughtered like a helpless chick.
Phineas had then fathered four sons and one daughter.
There was no point listing their names. The Black family had a habit of naming descendants after their ancestors, and writing them all out would make anyone's eyes glaze over. (The author's certainly did. Sorting out the family tree took ages.)
Of Phineas's four sons and one daughter, one son had been disowned. The other three sons had married women from three of the Sacred Twenty-Eight pure-blood families: Gamp (the family of the first Minister for Magic), Acrylics, and Birds.
His youngest daughter had married into the Borgin family.
In the next generation, several more boys had been disowned, adding a few more black holes to the family tree.
The two remaining sons had married daughters of the Prewett (Molly's maiden family) and Crabbe pure-blood families.
The daughters had married into pure-blood families such as Weasley, Crouch, Longbottom, Potter, and Rosier.
The web of marriages in the following generation was even harder to untangle.
If the Black family had not disowned so many members of its male line and produced so many lunatics,
the most powerful family in the wizarding world today would probably have been the Blacks.
Shawn's own grandfather, Orion Black, had even