Saskatchewan lost its oldest citizen Sept. 20.
Molly Swetlikoff of Kamsack, Sask., died two months short of her 109th birthday.
The former farmer first came to Canada in 1899, making her way to Mikado, Sask., with her brother and mother. They were pacifist Doukhobors who had left Swetlikoff’s father in prison in Siberia. A trip to England to ask Queen Victoria to intercede with the Russian Czarina to release the political prisoners was successful and in 1905 the family was reunited at Mikado.
Granddaughter Verna Boyechko said Swetlikoff married in 1917 and lived at several places in Saskatchewan before settling on a farm at Runnymede with her husband and four children.
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“She was a very plain person, not fashionable or materialistic,” Boyechko said.
“She baked her own bread, had a garden when she was 99 and washed clothes by hand.”
Swetlikoff’s ambition was to live to 100 so she could say she had lived in three centuries. She prayed every day and believed a person cannot live without God.
She and her husband retired from their farm to Kamsack in 1979. When he died the following year, she lived by herself until she broke her hip at age 99 and had to move to a group home and later a senior citizen’s home.
Boyechko said Swetlikoff never needed glasses or a hearing aid and was mentally alert until age 105 when she started failing.
Her descendants are scattered across Canada, but few of them farm and Boyechko didn’t think any are Doukhobor.
Saskatchewan Health says its latest statistics show that as of June 30, one Saskatchewan resident was 108, two were 107 and four were 106.
Swetlikoff was an example of the migration that helped build Saskatchewan’s population in the early 1900s. But the end of the 20th century has not been so kind. Saskatchewan has struggled to hold numbers. It regained the million-citizen mark in 1983, about 50 years after it had first hit that threshold.
