Nearly 20 years ago, when writing the book The London Gunners come to Town, I started to draft a record of all the shops that had been in Hemel Hempstead High Street a century ago, and after the book was published I started work on extending it further back into the 19th century, with the aim of including information from all the censuses - which were not available online at the time (and the 1901 and 1911 had not been released in any form). In fact I never finished it - or another on Marlowes - but I am always happy when a question gives me the opportunity to dig out my old notes.
As a result I was very pleased to get a message from Kevin providing some interesting information on the Walters family and asking about 106 High Street, which is where his great uncle was a corn merchant in 1882. If you look at WALTERS, 106 High Street, Hemel Hempstead, 1882-c1900 you will find a good example of what you can sometimes find if your relative lived, or had a shop, in the High Street of one of the larger towns. (Villages can be much harder as houses were not numbered until much later.)
