Continuing investigations into the records kept by child kidnapper and statuary saleswoman Victorian Hatfield have revealed that at least seven of the children currently in Ministry custody may have come from Muggle backgrounds. Kliney, the house elf who revealed the original conspiracy, has confirmed that Ms. Hatfield used "a lot of different sources," but has no knowledge of where specific children may have come from.

"The obvious difficulty with Muggle children is the time difference," explained a Ministry official. The transfigured children did not age while serving time as statues, which makes some of them as many as twenty years younger than they ought to have been. While magical citizens can accept this as a side effect of the transfiguration magic, the Ministry has found no way to overcome the difficulty associated with explaining it to a set of Muggle parents.

"Simply put, there's no way anyone will believe this is their child. Not without some proof, which would break the Statute of Secrecy," a representative commentated.

Having the children live at the Ministry indefinitely, however, is clearly not an option.

"We're still considering a variety of different avenues, but none of them are perfect," said the head of the department. "This obviously isn't an ideal situation. Right now, our efforts are focused on reuniting as many of the children as we can. There is still a lot of confusion about where some of these children have come from. Once we've determined how many came from magical backgrounds and how many Muggles we're really working with, we can better determine how to move forward."