Harry's lack of curiosity in those areas is baffling, as is the whole grandparent thing -- why (beyond dramatic expediency) would both sets of grandparents apparently be dead? When James and Lily were killed, at the oldest, the grandparents would have been 60 -- and they could easily have been as young as their early 40s.
It does say something about how real the characters become, that we blame them. I had the same reaction to a series of US girls' books from the 19th century, with a Southern plantation-owner heroine. Motherless, the girl is more or less raised by her black "mammy." When she's in her 20s, her family meets another slave-owning family who happen to own a girl who, it turns out, is Mammy's granddaughter. Here's our supposedly Christian heroine, living a life in which, for many years, her beloved Mammy was her sole companion, yet she never apparently asked about Mammy's history or knew that M. had had a husband, children, etc. Denial is a fascinating thing.
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It does say something about how real the characters become, that we blame them. I had the same reaction to a series of US girls' books from the 19th century, with a Southern plantation-owner heroine. Motherless, the girl is more or less raised by her black "mammy." When she's in her 20s, her family meets another slave-owning family who happen to own a girl who, it turns out, is Mammy's granddaughter. Here's our supposedly Christian heroine, living a life in which, for many years, her beloved Mammy was her sole companion, yet she never apparently asked about Mammy's history or knew that M. had had a husband, children, etc. Denial is a fascinating thing.