On the 5th July 2000, quite early on in my family history researches, I visited The Family Record Centre in Islington. One of my huge breakthroughs there was finding the 1891 Census record for the family of George and Jane Askew on microfiche. This was well before all Census records were searchable from your own computer. It looked like they had five children at the time, but there started a great mystery.
When I went to see my Aunt Iris (mother's sister) she had never heard of the four sisters (her and mother's aunts). She only knew of the youngest child, Thomas, and all his younger brothers and sisters. So why had nothing ever been said about the elder children?
I then found another sister, Eleanor, the eldest who was living next door with her maternal grandparents (Thomas and Eleanor Cuthbertson) at the time of the 1891 Census. So what happened to these mystery sisters. We know that Eleanor married a Ralph Harrison and by the 1911 Census they had five children. Lilly was 20 by the 1901 Census and probably had married as there is no record under her maiden name. Mary was 18 and may also have married.
Isabella was 17 in 1901 and was in the employ of a Publican, Walter Holloway and his wife Annie, as a General Domestic Servant at The Miner's Arms in Rotherham. The same year Jane was only 14 but already in employment as a Kitchen Maid to another Publican, Arthur Berwick and his wife Mary at Handsworth in Sheffield.
There is one sad postscript and that is the five sisters had a brother James, the second eldest of the eleven children to George and Jane. He was born in 1879 but does not appear on the 1891 Census or on any future such records, so probably had died as a child. But only one infant death out of eleven was better than average for such a family at that time.
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