LAW. First names unreadable (I have tried to read
them) on the Golden Dawn members’ roll.
Whoever they were - it’s not even clear whether it’s a man or a woman -
they were initiated into the Golden Dawn in March 1899 and took the Latin motto
‘Magnum bonum’.
It
keeps niggling away at me that there’s nothing I can do, really, to identify
this person. But there’s no doing even
the basic searches with so little information.
I shall have to rely on a lucky chance - spotting a name while reading
about someone quite different. It has
happened in this search for the Golden Dawn, though not often.
WHO
DID HE OR SHE KNOW IN THE GOLDEN DAWN? - anybody’s guess.
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.
Copyright
SALLY DAVIS
23
April 2012
