Samuel WILSON who was initiated into the
Golden Dawn in December 1892 and took the Latin motto ‘Finis coronat opus’. He didn’t remain in the GD long, however,
being considered to have resigned by August 1893. The only address he gave the GD for
correspondence was the Atlas Club, of Newman Street London.
Several
members of the GD gave a gentleman’s club as their address for
correspondence. It might have been that
they didn’t want post from such a source to arrive at their home address and be
opened by (say) their nosey landlord.
But all those members are ones - usually men - I’ve had difficulty
identifying on the usual family history websites, and I do think a club address
suggests a bird of passage, not likely to remain in England for very long. That makes the question of WHO THEY KNEW IN
THE GOLDEN DAWN even more difficult to answer, and I haven’t answered it in
this case. I don’t know anything about
this man.
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 wide variety of family trees on the web.
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
25
April 2012
