When was the Weasley's trip to Egypt? Mid summer, right after school?

Has anyone put together a website or calendar that plots out evens from the books year by year?

 

Harry was born on July 31, so the fact that he got a birthday present from Ron with the newspaper included means the picture was taken before July 31. Ron tried to call Harry on the first week of summer, which for them was the last week of June, and the paper said that the Weasley family planned a month long trip in Egypt.
Consider the calendar 1% put together.

 

I'm trying to put together an idea for the Q2 Competition and I have a question - was Dumbledore having a phoenix common knowledge? More specifically, let's say that a random Hogwarts student who isn't involved with Dumbledore in any way encounters Fawkes. Could he/she make the connection, or would they just think that's it's a random phoenix, however ridiculous that is?

 

Well, Harry does not know about Fawkes when he meets him in the second year although this is not a definitive answer as Harry seems to not know a lot of things.
It does not seem to be a secret, the order being named what it is after all. I would suggest therefore that you probably knew about Fawkes if you had ever read a book about Dumbledore or had some friends who had visited his office (Fawkes is sitting on a perch there and it's the type of stuff I would imagine children talk about).

 

The HP Lexicon has yearly calendars for each of the books, with most of the decisions documented so that you know their reasoning.

https://www.hp-lexicon.org/calendars-harry-potter-novels/

 

I have always found the issue of visits to the Headmaster’s office to be a curious one. Call me boring, but in my twelve years of primary and secondary schooling, I did not visit my headmaster’s or headmistress’ office once. Similarly, Dumbledore does not strike me as the type to get directly involved in trivial matters that could far more effectively be solved by his Heads of Houses. As such, one could argue that very few students ever had the opportunity (or misfortune, depending on the circumstances) to see his office, and thus, Fawkes. Of course, to make a counterpoint, one might argue that a single visit by a single, perhaps more gossipy student (Sirius, after Snape’s “adventure” at the Shrieking Shack?) would be enough to make Fawkes common knowledge.

Given that there are arguments for both sides and I do not believe that we know anything definitive from canon sources, I guess for the purposes of a story the author could play it however they liked.

 

There are some fanfics which use "Sacred twenty eight" pureblood stuff. Does this have a canon basis? The closest I can recall is a book named wizarding genealogies or something of that type in the latter books.

 

The Sacred 28 is from Pottermore, but just as with basically everything else in canon, fanfiction writers didn't read it properly and have proceeded to proliferate their misunderstanding.

In fanfiction, the Sacred 28 is generally some ancient group of pure-bloods families which are widely recognised to be the elite, that recognition being supported be genuine wealth and political power.

In canon, the Sacred 28 was a book written in the early 1900s by an individual pure-blood who basically named all his BFFs as purer than everyone else and excluded a load of families which would have had equal or greater claim to "elite" status. It is widely considered to be a biased work with no real basis and is only considered an authority by the handful of families who were a) named in the book and b) committed to pure-blood supremacy.

 

It was presumably destroyed.

 

Went wiki trawling, looks like he loses it in the chase.

 

I mean it landed in a muggle neighborhood, so I imagine some Ministry employee went there and picked it up, obliviating everyone who saw it.

 

Or it got lost.
The Nimbus broke apart in third year so it is possible that the Firebolt was also destroyed.

 

The Nimbus got smashed apart by the whomping willow.

 

A destroyed broomstick, a dead owl in a cage, and a ton of spellbooks in a trunk fallen from the sky in a sidecar still raise a lot of questions. The Ministry was also looking for Harry during DH, and going through his possessions might yield clues to his whereabouts.

 

Hedwig would still be alive and he would still have his firebolt if an order member had just taken Harry's stuff to a location away from Harry(to avoid the trace) and apparated with them to the Burrow. They were eliminated, as you said, for plot reasons.(correction: As Sesc said)

 

For the record, the other guy with the snake picture said they were eliminated for plot reasons, though there's little doubt of this. I was merely theorizing what most likely happened to the broomstick after it was destroyed.