Nicknames: Nope.
Birthdate: October 23rd, 1854
Current Age: 35 Years
Occupation: Wandmaker & Owner of Ollivander’s, Hogsmeade
Reputation: 9; generally respectable but can occasionally be seen over-indulging in drink and making some Questionable Choices. But nothing too questionable.
Residence: Hogsmeade
Hogwarts House: Slytherin
Wand: English oak and phoenix feather, rigid, 11 ¾ inches.
Blood Status: Pureblood
Social Class: Middle
Family:
Gerbold Ollivander, Father [1827 - 1884]
Gervaise Ollivander, Brother [1853]
Violet MacFusty nee Ollivander, Sister [1860], and family
Billie Farrow, Daughter [1879]
Appearance: Marginally taller than his older brother, Gideon is no less stoutly built; he looks as though he would have played beater, were he ever inclined towards Quidditch. He has brown hair which curls slightly (more significantly the longer he allows it to grow). He usually wears facial hair, which, despite his best efforts at being well-groomed, makes him look a bit disheveled most of the time, as it grows in unevenly and looks unkempt if he doesn't trim it every morning. He has light eyes and is right-handed. He dresses well, but modestly, as he has never been particularly keen on fashion. When he's been working, he'll often remove several outer layers and walk around in only a shirt with rolled sleeves, and it's not entirely uncommon for a customer to catch him in this state of mild undress, particularly if they're visiting the shop during off-hours.
History:
Personality: Gideon has a generally jovial demeanor that makes him easy to get along with and easy to befriend. He has an affinity for children and animals that first showed itself in his Hogwarts years but has continued to develop and grow as he’s gotten older. He has an uncanny ability to soothe people (or animals) when they are upset, but can sometimes be too short-sighted to see anyone’s point of view but his own if he’s directly involved in the dispute. He only really tends to argue with people when he’s particularly tired or has been drinking, though, so it doesn’t come up much.
One of Gideon’s earliest memories is of his brother receiving a wand (albeit one that is locked away for safekeeping). He finds this terribly unfair and throws a tantrum but is not rewarded with a wand of his own, and must wait all the way until his Hogwarts letter arrives to claim one. He thinks his first sign of magic may earn him an early reward when it comes in 1859, but to no avail. Life goes on uneventfully until 1860, when a pregnancy claims the life of his mother. The entire family seems to be planning to just pretend the resulting daughter isn’t related to them at all — his father names her Violet and banishes her to the servants’ area of the house — and Gideon is content to follow their lead in this. She’s just a red-faced, squishy baby, anyway, so it’s not as though he’d very fond of her.
He is quietly convinced that Gervaise is their father’s favorite for most of his childhood, and particularly in the rush of his going off to Hogwarts in 1864. Gideon continues to not have a wand, or even permission to go look at them, until his own Hogwarts departure in fall of 1866.
Gideon goes off to Hogwarts and is sorted into Slytherin, where he gets on passably well with his classmates and is happy to have distinguished himself from his brother a bit by being sorted into a different house. He does well enough in his classes, but isn’t a particularly academic type by nature. His best classes are hands-on work, like potions and herbology. This leads him to add Care of Magical Creatures, Ghoul Studies (how disappointing that it doesn’t involve meeting any ghouls!) and divination in his third year, though he doesn’t have much talent in the latter. He is looking forward to adding alchemy after his OWL exams, as he assumes that with Gervaise already at home and learning the trade of wandmaking from his father, there isn’t much of a need for him to follow suit. His father apparently disagrees, and makes it known that he will be coming home after fifth year and learning wandcraft as well. Although he outwardly protests not being able to continue on to NEWT classes, he is secretly a little pleased that his father actually seems to want him home.
It seems that his father’s insistence on having him home is more a matter of protocol than a sign of affection, as the old man has little interest in him outside of barking orders in the workshop. At first Gideon is determined to impress his father by showing himself a prodigy at wandmaking, but that simply isn’t in the cards… even Gervaise is better than him, and Gervaise is still only an apprentice himself. Around the time he turns sixteen, Gideon shifts his attention to other things. He still pulls his weight in his father’s workshop, but he spends all of his free time doing what any teenage boy with a wand, his freedom, and a small bit of income would do — getting into trouble.
Luckily by the time the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery is passed in 1875, he’s of legal age to do magic — all the same, he thinks it’s a little ridiculous. And will dramatically change the Ollivander family dynamic moving forward, if they can’t do anything outside of school until seventeen, but since that’s not an immediate concern (and unlikely to be his concern anyway, since Gervaise is set to inherit the lot of it). Gideon assumes that he’ll eventually have to make the decision between working for his older brother or striking out on his own, at least until 1877. The move to Hogsmeade and the opening of a second shop gives him some hope that maybe he’ll have some modicum of independence while still staying in the family business after all.
If he can ever figure out how to actually make good wands, anyway. While the ones he works on himself are passable, they’re not quite right and they certainly don’t compare to those crafted by his father and brother. He starts to procure less common ingredients for experimentation, in the hopes that he’ll strike on something brilliant, but to no avail. In the meantime, he keeps getting himself into trouble, though as he grows older he finds discretion more important and tries to keep his drunken revelries and sexual escapades to the darker areas of London. In 1878 he unknowingly fathers a daughter, but for many years this particular encounter would not stand out to him.
His sister gets married in 1883. Did you remember that he had a sister? Gideon basically didn’t. He attends the wedding, but feels a little awkward about it since the two have never been close.
Gideon has been sort of eyeing the London branch of Ollivander’s for the past few years now. He’s long since transitioned from apprentice to wandmaker, and while he assumes that the fully stocked workshop in Hogsmeade will be passed to Gervaise eventually, he thinks he might be able to convince his father to let him manage the Diagon branch on his own in the meantime — but he wants to have something really impressive to show the old man before he asks, which has stayed his request so far. That summer brings with it a fire that destroys the Hogsmeade shop and claims their father’s life, which derails that particular plan. Luckily, Gervaise seems to be of the same mind he is about the good sense of splitting the management of the two branches. Unluckily, he claims the Diagon branch for himself and leaves Gideon with, in essence, a burnt plot of land and a good deal of debt to face in order to rebuild it. So thanks for that, bro.
Gideon works hard to rebuild after the fire, first with the physical building and then by replenishing his stock. He needs a good deal of help from his brother with the latter in order to be ready to open by the 1885 summer season. Meanwhile, Gervaise is apparently doing so well he can take on apprentices. Show-off. It takes several years before Gideon feels the shop is “really” reopened properly (though it had been doing business during all that time, the workshop portion was much slower to build and restock and his standards for it were much higher). He starts to think maybe he ought to be considering starting a family, and has some tentative flirtations with a few young women which go nowhere. Gervaise is slightly more successful, as he starts courting a girl in 1887 and becomes engaged to her in 1888, but it’s rather short lived as she ends up eloping via magically-laced letter later that year. Gervaise is, understandably, not thrilled.
Earlier in 1888, Gideon met what he presumed to be an orphan on the street that he took a bit of a shine to; children in general had been growing on him increasingly throughout the years that he ran the Hogsmeade shop, and he was starting to get antsy for some of his own. After he takes the orphan to London on a whim, he discovers that his unspoken wish has actually been granted — the kid is his own, or at least her (her!) mother claims so. Since he does vaguely recognize the woman, he assumes it must be true.
So — what the hell to do about that? He has no idea, but doesn’t want to just let her keep living on the streets catching rats for her bread money, so he takes her in and builds out a cozy room at the back of the shop for her to live in. As they spend more time together, he grows more and more fond of her — and less and less clear on what to do with her. The fact that she’s been living her life as another gender for several years and quite clearly prefers it that way doesn’t help matters much, but how is he supposed to school her on how to be a proper young lady? He considers marrying to give her a ‘mother’ of sorts, and even picks out a few potential candidates, but he can’t go through with it knowing that he’d be trapping some poor woman into a (probably) loveless marriage for the sake of raising a bastard she knows nothing about. And obviously telling any young woman all of that is off the table.
Her Hogwarts letter is scheduled to arrive any day now, though, so a decision has to be made one way or another…
Although generally kind and forgiving for others, he has exacting standards when it comes to his own work that he is perpetually falling short of. He is ambitious but also considers himself a realist and tempers his expectations to match his perceived shortcomings. In both his professional work and his personal relationships, he tends to undervalue himself and imagine that everyone could do just as well (or even better) without him.