The speculation contained in J.K. Rowling's biography of Harry Potter is actually a fairly decent gloss en miniature on the subject. Unfortunately, this is a roundabout means of saying that we don't really know for sure.

On the subject of why people avoid ... er, the subject: Interestingly, the solid information that we do have largely comes to us via Albus Dumbledore and (appallingly enough) Gellert Grindelwald. This has been an issue of tremendous controversy in the Wizarding community, and I suspect that many have avoided this branch of our history simply out of revulsion for one of its few principal scholars. However, we're sufficiently removed from Grindelwald's attempted rise to power that the stigma of studying his work has faded among the younger generations, and the events of the Second Wizarding War stimulated additional interest in the Hallows. I am hoping for more and better scholarship on the subject soon.

What we do know is as follows: As Rowling relates, the three Hallows -- the Elder Wand, the Resurrection Stone, and the Cloak of Invisibility -- are thought to have been the creation of the three Peverell brothers. This is sufficient to give us a starting point, as the Peverell family was connected with the Wizarding hamlet of Godric's Hollow for the better part of two centuries as traders and craftsmen, and one of them (Ignotus) is buried at St. Clementine's there.

The Peverell brothers were as follows:

• Antioch Peverell (b. ??? 1207-8: died ??? 1260): Here is where we run into the first of our many difficulties: We do not actually have the birth or death dates of the eldest or middle brother. We can of course safely assume that they were born prior to Ignotus (if Ignotus was indeed the youngest brother), but that's really about it. Late medieval Wizarding families generally had age gaps of 3-4 years between children; this was several hundred years prior to the invention of the contraceptive charm, and, much like their Muggle counterparts, witches generally nursed children for several years in a bid to avoid dangerous back-to-back pregnancies. We are unhappily confined to speculation that Antioch was thus 3-4 years older than Cadmus, and 6-8 years older than Ignotus. He's reputed to be the creator of the Elder Wand, which may or may not have been the most powerful and dangerous of the Hallows, subject to which theory you accept concerning the nature of the Resurrection Stone. (More on this in a bit.)

Please note that the death date I have given here is even more a matter of conjecture than his birth date. If Antioch is indeed the shadowy figure in The Tale of the Three Brothers who met his end at knifepoint, then we can assume he probably did so as an adult after creating the Elder Wand. And yes, I think he was actually the second of the three brothers to die, and not the first as is implied in the tale. Again, we'll come back to this in a little bit.

• Cadmus Peverell (b. ??? 1210: died at some point post-1231): Cadmus is the figure behind the Resurrection Stone who was said to have hanged himself after his creation "resurrected" his fiancée and drove him to despair. We run into another complicated problem here because: a). There is a record in St. Clementine's of a marriage between a Cadmus Peverell and Beatrice Hopkirk in 1231: b). Beatrice died after giving birth to a daughter later that same year, and: c). Cadmus vanishes from the church's records afterwards.

If Beedle's account is accurate (and that is a VERY big if), is Beatrice the fiancée of the tale, in reality a wife? Is the fiancée actually another woman whom Cadmus hoped to marry after losing his first wife, or was it only ever just Beatrice? Or -- worse yet -- did he actually lose a wife and a fiancée in quick succession? We don't know, but either way, we have the portrait of a young man wracked by guilt and consumed with the idea of recovering what had been lost.

Cadmus' daughter is probably the descendant who inherited the Resurrection Stone, starting a chain that eventually ended with a Gaunt descendant (He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named) and subsequently Albus Dumbledore and Harry Potter in the 20th century. If Cadmus did commit suicide, that may explain why there is no subsequent mention of him in St. Clementine's records: The stigma against suicide in the Wizarding community was much stronger in this era than it is at present, and Cadmus would have been buried quietly in an unmarked grave in unconsecrated ground. Whether this was in Godric's Hollow is anyone's guess, and of course, it's always possible that he died elsewhere under vastly different circumstances.

• Ignotus Peverell (b. July 12th, 1214: died May 18th, 1291): Ignotus is sadly the only brother for whom we have firm birth and death dates. Indeed, some scholars think the relative lack of records for the two older siblings suggest that the Peverell parents moved here with family in tow, before St. Clementine's would have been obliged to record anything about their existence. Strangely, the fixed dates that we have for Ignotus' life are no proof against an even greater lack of information or even informed conjecture as compared to his brothers. We can hazard a guess at Antioch's lifespan from study of the Elder Wand: Cadmus is likely to have died as a young man: Of Ignotus, we know very little, which is perhaps appropriate for a man who devised such an extraordinary way to escape notice, but frustrating all the same.
• Other children (???): It is possible -- for that matter, likely -- that the Peverells had an additional child or children whose names are unfortunately lost to history. Please see Wizarding Families of the 12th-15th Centuries in Britain and the discussion therein concerning alternate spellings of Peverell (e.g., Pevrall, Peverelle, Pevril) and the difficulty of tracking the family as a result, which suggests that Nature's Nobility: A Wizarding Geneaology may have jumped the gun on the "early death" of the surname. There is a Peverill in the Muggle Domesday Book two centuries prior, for whatever that's worth. I do not share the opinion of the "pure blood" community that interbreeding with the Muggle community was solely a later development.

There is no mention of the Hallows prior to the 13th century, which further strengthens our belief that the Peverells are in fact responsible for their creation. A variety of very powerful magical artifacts in lore certainly existed both before and after under different names, but the Hallows seem to be a very singular construction.

Continued below with a discussion of the Resurrection Stone.

As written in Hogwarts : a History :
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