Jones died yesterday at a senior home in Brooklyn, Robert Young, a senior consultant for the Los Angles-based Gerontology Research Group, said.
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The world’s oldest living person, 116-year-old Susannah Mushatt Jones, died on Thursday here, a research group said.
Jones always maintained that lots of sleep and no smoking or drinking were the main reasons she lived to celebrate her 116th birthday previous year. She left after a year to begin working as a nanny, heading north to New Jersey and eventually making her way to NY. When she graduated from high school in 1922, Jones worked full time helping family members pick crops.
“She adored kids”, Lois Judge said of her aunt in a 2015 interview with The Associated Press. She married a man called Henry Jones in 1928, but the marriage only lasted a few years.
Jones credited her long life to not drinking, smoking, or partying, a family member told NBC, adding that the fresh fruit and vegetables she ate during her childhood helped maintain her health.
“She’s tough, but she knew that somehow if she exposed herself to all those medical procedures it’s going to kill her”, she said.
And she was active in her public housing building’s tenant patrol until she was 106.
She had attributed her longevity to sleep, clean living and positive energy.
She was the last known American to have been born in the 1800s, and there is now only one verified person in the world to have taken breath in the 19th century.
Jones became Guinness World Records official oldest person when 117-year-old Misao Okawa of Japan died last year.
Italy’s Emma Morano Martinuzz is now believed to be the world’s oldest person and the last person born in the 19th century.
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An Italian woman, Emma Moran, who is just a few months younger than Ms. Jones, takes over the baton of the world’s known oldest person.
