It also had a branch in the United States, whose members presumably attended the Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the most prominent of whom was Auror Abraham Potter, one of the first in his profession on American soil. The Potters have traditionally been sorted into Gryffindor House at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The Potters were, for many generations, Pure-blood, up until the birth of Harry Potter in 1980, but they were excluded from the Sacred Twenty-Eight due to their egalitarian stance on blood purity. Potter was the surname of an old wizarding family descended from Ignotus Peverell and Linfred of Stinchcombe.
Potter is a not uncommon Muggle surname, and the family did not make the so-called Sacred Twenty-Eight for this reason the anonymous compiler of that supposedly definitive list of pure-bloods suspected that they had sprung from what he considered to be tainted blood." - Early description of the Potter family
" The Potter family is a very old one, but it was never (until the birth of Harry James Potter) at the very forefront of wizarding history, contenting itself with a solid and comfortable existence in the backwaters.