Probably Vera possibly Foster definitely Kelly who was initiated into the Golden Dawn in October 1899 and chose the Latin mott

Probably Vera possibly Foster definitely Kelly who was initiated into the Golden Dawn in October 1899 and chose the Latin motto ‘Veritas simile’.

The name says it all, when it comes to the problem of identifying the lesser-known members of the Golden Dawn. When compiling his list of GD members R A Gilbert couldn’t read this woman’s handwriting, and transcribed a best guess. I hoped that I might do a bit better when I finally got to see the GD Members’ Roll which R A Gilbert had as his original source; but I couldn’t make anything more of her name than Gilbert had.

I didn’t see much point in trying to follow up someone whose name I couldn’t be sure of.

BASIC SOURCES I USED for all Golden Dawn members.

Membership of the Golden Dawn: The Golden Dawn Companion by R A Gilbert. Northampton: The Aquarian Press 1986. Between pages 125 and 175, Gilbert lists the names, initiation dates and addresses of all those people who became members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or its many daughter Orders between 1888 and 1914. The list is based on the Golden Dawn’s administrative records and its Members’ Roll - the large piece of parchment on which all new members signed their name at their initiation. All this information had been inherited by Gilbert but it’s now in the Freemasons’ Library at the United Grand Lodge of England building on Great Queen Street Covent Garden.

Family history: freebmd; ancestry.co.uk (census and probate); findmypast.co.uk; familysearch; Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage; Burke’s Landed Gentry; Armorial Families; thepeerage.com; and a variety of one-family genealogy websites.

Famous-people sources: mostly about men, of course, but very useful even for the female members of GD. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Who Was Who. Times Digital Archive.

Catalogues: British Library; Freemasons’ Library.

Wikipedia; Google; Google Books - my three best resources. I also used other web pages, but with some caution, as - from the historian’s point of view - they vary in quality a great deal.

23 April 2012