Talk:Edwin Holmes (astronomer)

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Years of birth and death

The very short obituary in JBAA says that he "retired in 1918 at the age of 79", i.e. he was born in 1838 or 1839. Thus he cannot be identical with the Edmund Holmes in http://tuckley.org/genealogy/g009.html. The obituary does not give a year of death. This issue of JBAA appeared in January 1919, thus he probably died in 1918 or not later as the first days of 1919. The Astronomischer Jahresbericht (AJB) gives it as 1919 based on the JBAA obituary, but AJB contains many errors and often assumes wrong dates. However, the same page of JBAA contains a death notice of Jerome Coggia, who died on 15 January 1919, so that a death of Edwin Holmes in January 1919 is possible. Astrohist (talk) 07:57, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The first biographical article about Edwin Holmes is available as a preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.7723 . It was written by Jeremy Shears and should appear in the JBAA (I haven't found a published article yet, so it looks like it is still in press). That preprint provides details of Holmes's birth and death - I've added the information to the article. The full reference will have to be added to this Wikipedia article when Shears's article appears in print. Well done to Astrohist for making first progress in this direction. TowardsTheLight (talk) 18:31, 18 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]