Ethel THOMPSON who was initiated into the
Golden Dawn in September 1900, taking the Latin motto ‘Omnia expertum facto’. By this stage, GD record-keepers were not
noting down the addresses of the members.
The
census nearest to the date of the initiation was a favourite starting point for
me, when attempting to identify the GD members.
There were 846 women called Ethel Thompson on the 1901 census in England
alone. And of course, the particular
Ethel Thompson I was after might not have been any of those; quite likely not,
in fact - the day of the 1901 census fell during the Easter school and college
vacation, so even GD members who lived in England and whom I’d identified very
easily on other censuses were not on the 1901 one, because they were away from
home.
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
24
April 2012
