Inez Elise Young, née Dougan, who was born on Oct. 30, 1912, to one Mr. Dougan and Wilhelmina Birkette, of Old Montrose, Kingstown, the Vincentian capital, died on June 18, in Brooklyn.
The 103-year-old Young, who had resided in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, was a resident at the Palm Gardens Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in the same borough.
Inez had two brothers Samuel and Maurice and sisters Beryl, Albina, and Ruby. They all preceded her in death and although all of them lived long lives, she is the only one to have become a centurion.
In 1958, Inez married Samuel Young who passed away in 1975. The union produced no children but she took care of Ken, her stepson, and Rawle, her great nephew.
Inez was a housewife for the better part of her life in St. Vincent and ran a preschool at one time. Today, many of the students who attended her school have become quite successful in St. Vincent and further afield including here in the United States.
Inez was a devout Christian lady and was active at her home grown church, the Kingstown Methodist Church. She was at one time a Sunday School teacher and a member of the Church’s Women’s League, up to the time she left St Vincent to broaden her horizons in the United States of America.
She was in and out of the hospital in the latter stages of her life, her great-nephew, Rawle Mars, an accountant, who currently resides in St. Kitts, told Caribbean Life in an exclusive interview.
Mars, who grew up with Young until he was 12, and several relatives were among mourners at a two-hour-long funeral service at Young’s home church, Sheepshead Bay United Methodist Church, in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn.
“I can tell you, she loved me to her heart; she treated me like her son,” said Mars in his tribute at the funeral service, presided over by the church’s Jamaican-born pastor the Rev. Sharon Cundy.
“What she was doing was serving humanity,” the Brooklyn resident, a former banker in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, told mourners. “Even in her ‘90s, she volunteered at Coney Island Hospital [in Brooklyn].
Young was laid to rest at Rosemount Memorial Park & Mausoleum in Elizabeth, NJ.
Contributions From Nelson King and News784
