JERALEAN TALLEY WAS born in Montrose, Georgia, the American Deep South, on 23 May 1899.
She died yesterday, aged 116 – the world’s oldest person.
Her daughter Thelma Hollaway confirmed that her mother had passed away at her home in Inkster, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan.
Holloway said today her mother was recently hospitalized and treated for fluid in her lungs, but was grateful to return home, “just where she wanted to be.”
Talley turned 116 last month, and celebrated her birthday with a ceremony at her church, and received a personal letter of congratulations from US President Barack Obama.
Speaking to WJBK in Detroit last month, she shared some of the wisdom she gathered by living in three centuries:
Treat your fellow man – I don’t care what colour – treat him like you want to be treated.
According to her daughter Thelma, she “didn’t believe in diets”, and ate precisely whatever she wanted, including junk food.
Talley’s husband died in 1988, aged 95.
The Gerontology Research Group, which keeps careful records of “super-centenarians“, considered Talley to be the world’s oldest person, followed by Susannah Mushatt Jones of Brooklyn, New York.
Jones turns 116 in July, and now assumes the title of world’s oldest person.
The oldest Irish person is Kathleen Hayes Rollins Snavely, who turned 113 in February.
Snavely, who was born in Feakle, Co Clare and now lives in New York, is also the longest-lived Irish person in history.
Contains reporting by the Associated Press.
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