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