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NEW YORK (AP) — Susannah Mushatt Jones, the world's oldest person, has died in New York at age 116.
Robert
Young, a senior consultant for the Los Angeles-based Gerontology
Research Group, said Jones died Thursday night at a public housing
facility for seniors in Brooklyn where she had lived for more than three
decades. He said she had been ill for the past 10 days.
Jones
was born in a small farm town near Montgomery, Alabama, in 1899. She
was one of 11 siblings and attended a special school for young black
girls. When she graduated from high school in 1922, Jones worked full
time helping family members pick crops. She left after a year to begin
working as a nanny, heading north to New Jersey and eventually making
her way to New York.
"She
adored kids," Lois Judge said of her aunt in a 2015 interview with The
Associated Press. Jones never had any children of her own and was
married for only a few years.
Family
members said last year that they credited her long life to love of
family and generosity to others. Judge said at the time that she
believed it helped that her aunt grew up on a rural farm, where she ate
fresh fruits and vegetables that she picked herself.
After
she moved to New York, Jones worked with a group of her fellow high
school graduates to start a scholarship fund for young African-American
women to go to college. She also was active in her public housing
building's tenant patrol until she was 106.
Jones became Guinness World Records' official oldest person when 117-year-old Misao Okawa died in Tokyo last year.
"Ms.
Jones was the very last American from the 1800s," said Young, whose
group tracks and maintains a database of the world's longest-living
people.
Young
said 116-year-old Emma Morano, of Verbania, Italy, just a few months
younger than Jones, is now the unofficial world's oldest person.
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