Andrew NEILSON who was one of the earliest
members of the Golden Dawn, being initiated in August 1888 and taking the Latin
motto ‘Perseverando’. In GD records from
1903 he was described as “demitted”: that is, at some point between 1888 and
1903 he had not paid his subscriptions for three years and so his membership
had lapsed.
A man
who gives as his address the Union Bank of Scotland, Ingram Street, Glasgow, is
not going to be easily found. He might
have been employed at the bank, of course; but I think not. I wouldn’t want mail from a group of
magicians turning up at my place of work.
It’s much more likely that he moved around a great deal or actually
lived abroad, using the bank as a poste restante address. I certainly haven’t found anyone who might be
him, in my searches of the usual family history websites.
The
only thing I know for certain about him is that he joined the Theosophical
Society (TS) a year or so after his GD initiation; perhaps he found the TS more
to his taste than the GD. He gave the
same bank as his address, though, so finding him in the TS membership registers
didn’t lead me to any identification of him.
WHO
DID HE KNOW IN THE GOLDEN DAWN? Despite
knowing so very little about Andrew Neilson, I have a very tentative answer to
that, based on the very early date he joined the GD. A large group of the earliest members were
freemasonry friends of William Westcott, and it’s possible that Andrew Neilson
was one of them. He wasn’t a member of
any of the English lodges that Westcott had contacts with, however. It’s much more likely that if Neilson was a
freemason he was a Scottish one.
Scotland is separate from England for freemasonry purposes and keeps its
own records. I haven’t checked the
Scottish archives of freemasonry for more information on Neilson - it helps the
archivists look, if you can give them a date of birth for the man in question,
and of course I haven’t got one.
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.
For
the Theosophical Society: membership books for the period 1889-1901, held at
the TS headquarters on Gloucester Place London W1.
Copyright
SALLY DAVIS
24
April 2012
