In yesterday's Spokesman-Review, my favorite obituary was that of Yekaterina Sergeyevna Makhanova, an 85-year-old immigrant from the former Soviet Union. She was born in the Ukraine and moved, in 1996, to Deer Park and then Newman Lake "be with her children here in America."

She was mother to 14 children, 84 grandchildren and 55 great-granchildren and "her family tree consists of 213 people of which 210 are living."

We rarely see obituaries in our classified obits from residents of the former Soviet Union even though the  Inland Northwest area is home to immigrants from there, more than 20,000.

But, like my Italian immigrant relatives who came to Spokane in the early 20th century, that population doesn't surface often in the mainstream press. So we don't have many of the details of their lives, such as all the living Mrs. Makhanova did in her 85 years, 15 of them in the Inland Northwest.

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