Alfred MONCK or possibly Monk, who
was initiated into the Golden Dawn in September 1890 and chose the Latin motto ‘Vincit
veritas’. From the information given by
R A Gilbert, Alfred doesn’t seem to have had much of the commitment necessary
to get very far in the GD, and in 1892 he let them know that he was
resigning. When he was initiated his
address was 35 Seckforde Street Clerkenwell London EC.
Alfred
appears in R A Gilbert’s The Golden Dawn Companion with his surname
spelled two different ways. On p145, in
Gilbert’s list of members in order of initiation, it’s spelled with the ‘c’ in
it. However, when Mathers prepared a
list of people who were no longer members, in 1894, he left the ‘c’ out. I think MONCK is the correct spelling. But I couldn’t find Alfred anywhere, spelled
either way.
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