Case Study

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid was the head of the local C.I.D - H. Division in Whitechapel, and the man who started the 'Jack the Ripper' investigation (see 1891 News page).

I decided to look him up in the 1891 Census. A quick name search at TheGenealogist.co.uk website for the London 1891 Census gave me the following result:

Surname: Reid; Forename: Edmund; Age: 58; Area: Shoreditch South; Piece Number: 242; Folio Number: 15a

Armed with those details, I then browsed through British Data Archive's London 1891 census CD set and found the following entry on Folio 15a of Piece Number 242:

From reading that entry, I gathered that at the time of the Census he was 45 years old and was living in the H. Division Police Station of the Metropolitan Police, 124 Commercial Street, Shoreditch with his wife Emily (44), his daughter Elizabeth (17) and his son Harold (9).

Folio 15a and 15b also feature the names of all the policemen living at the H. Division police station at the time of the census.