Mrs Emmeline Alice CLARK who was initiated into the
Golden Dawn at the Horus Temple Bradford in September 1895. She chose the Latin motto ‘Vade’ and was one
of a group of members of Horus Temple who actually lived in Liverpool, not
Bradford: 40 Claremont Road Smithdown Road.
I
tried looking for Emmeline Clark on the censuses of 1891 and 1901, feeling
quite hopeful of finding her because of her relatively uncommon forename. But there was no one of that name living in
Liverpool on either census. Just in case
the census official had spelled Emmeline’s surname wrongly, I checked under
ClarkE but still couldn’t identify her.
I can
answer the question WHO DID SHE KNOW IN THE GOLDEN DAWN however, because I
found Emmeline in the Members’ Register of the Theosophical Society (TS), which
she joined in November 1894 giving them the same address as she subsequently
gave the GD. She paid her subscription
to the TS in 1894 and 1895 but then seems to have let her membership
lapse. On her record at the TS was a
note to indicate that she had sided against the eventual winners of a dispute
within the TS in the aftermath of Blavatsky’s death. And/or she had just moved away. As a member, however briefly, of the TS in
Liverpool she will have met these people who were members of both TS in
Liverpool and GD in Bradford: the Nisbets, John Hill, William Ranstead and
Isabel de Steiger.
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
27
April 2012
