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.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
God Bless this angel. May she rest in a well deserved peace.
There is some good in every one. She
Wore hers for all to see a appreciate!
Others sometimes are difficult to find
The good, smothered by the not-so-
good.
Hezekiah
God Bless this Wonderful Ladies Soul, and her Family, and Friends. When I was a young man, I used to love talking to, and listening to older folks talk about yesteryear.
She was a wonderful lady nice to everyone that’s the reason God kept her on earth so long to witness and now he’s called her home to be an angel in heaven.
What’s wrong with my comment?!!
Before Noah’s flood, c. B.C. 2500, when all creation was still close to its original perfection but for the Fall of mankind, and the dense cloud cover of the firmament protected the earth’s inhabitants from solar and cosmic radiation, men lived to astounding ages:
Adam, 930 years after God created him as an adult;
Seth, his son, lived 912 years;
Enosh, his son, lived 905 years;
Kenan, his son, lived 910 years;
Mahalalel, his son, lived 895 years;
Jared, his son, lived 962 years;
Enoch, his son, lived 365 years, and God took him to heaven without him dying;
and Methuselah, his son, lived 969 years.
Everyone remembers Methuselah. At 969 years old, he was the oldest man who ever lived.
But no one remembers his grandfather, Jared, who lived almost as long: 962 years.
Times were different. There was little or no cancer, with no harsh sun rays and no tobacco. Heart attack and stroke must have been rare in the absence of pork and cholesterol-laden shellfish. Even with an abundance of wine, there was probably not enough camel traffic to cause any fatal collisions. But the earth was corrupt and filled with violence, man’s wickedness was great, and the hearts of men were set upon only evil continually.. Why, the sons of God were even marrying the daughters of men, of all things. God was so grieved that He was sorry that He had made man.
“Then the Lord said, ‘My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.'” Which would cause Noah a problem, since he was already five hundred years young. But instead of going shopping for a double indemnity insurance policy payable to his wife and three sons in the event of his unfortunate but predictable demise, being three hundred and eighty years overdue for his appointment with God, Noah went seeking for grace in the eyes of the Lord. He found it, too, although it was probably never really lost, and in God’s eyes, Noah was already saved, but for the one necessity, that he build a 450-foot barge and half-fill it with groceries.
NEVERTHELESS . . . with that reset to a new and hopefully improved remake of the human race, Rev. 2.0, God changed the lifespan of human beings to roughly one-eighth of the original warranty period, reducing it to no more than one hundred and twenty years tops. That didn’t keep man from cutting his life short, if he insisted on planting a vineyard, making wine, getting drunk, taking the ark out of drydock on the mountains of Ararat and doing doughnuts in the Med, or in the Caspian Sea if the weather was nice.
So that’s why you never hear about anyone passing her hundred and twenty-first birthday, but always passing on to God’s heavenly retirement home (or to the lake of fire and brimstone) by age one hundred and sixteen or seventeen, or even forty years before that, if the actuaries have their statistics right, and earlier still, if those statistics refer to the male of the species homo sapiens.