Effie was the daughter of George Brown Sketheway and Jane Edgar (Balfour), and was baptized on 15 April 1877 at the Flinders Street Presbyterian Church. In 1881 the family moved to Mount Pleasant, where Effie was admitted to the Presbyterian Church on the 17 November 1894 at the age of eighteen.
In 1909 Sketheway was living in Wright Street, Adelaide, but in 1911 her family moved from Mount Pleasant to George St, Kent Town, and in 1912 her mother died. In 1922 Effie moved to a small house in Norwood with her sisters Jessie and Mabel. She also had another sister, Edith Goodes, who lived at Grange. The family remembers that one of her sisters was matron of the Queen Victoria Hospital.
Effie used to walk to the city to work at (probably) T&G Insurance. She was admitted to the Home for Incurables as the result of a fall (one account says from a horse, another that she slipped in the street), and on her death in 1948 was buried at the Payneham Cemetery with her parents and sister.
