okay, i have a few things to say on this matter and i'm not gonna bother to quote all the people who said what because it would just take way too long.

first, i still to this day hold out hope that people will just suddenly get BORED of having the last name Potter, Weasley, Lestrange, Black, Riddle or any of the other real big movers and shakers in the series. I mean, do you KNOW how many cousins you've got? I gotta tell you right now, it doesn't make your character automatically cool. And like Trel said, if you wanna be a Pureblood, yeah, you pretty much have to pull a name from canon, but why not go into the hp lexicon and yank some obscure name from there? Like Youdle or Wellbeloved?

And to she who was complaining about JKR not giving attention to foreign students enough. Did you ever stop and consider that they might be going to their own schools in their own countries? That was kinda of what the existence of Beaubatons and Durmstrang was supposed to imply. I've created 2 schools for just one of my charries because she kept getting kicked out of places. One in Canada, one in Italy. I don't think JKR was ignoring other cultures and races while she was writing the series. I think she just couldn't include every place and every race in the world without making the stories become Harry Potter and a Study in Cultural Anthropology.