Oldest person in the world dies at Glastonbury June 24, 2007
In fact this is a newspaper report dating from January and from Glastonbury, Connecticut, USA : Emma Faust Tillman, who became the world’s oldest known living person, died at a nursing home. She was 114.
Tillman, the daughter of former slaves ”went peacefully,” said observers “She was a wonderful woman.” Several family members were with Tillman when she died.
Tillman, who lived independently until she was 110 years old, was deeply religious since childhood and always attributed her longevity to God’s will”
Tillman’s great-nephew, former Hartford fire chief John B. Stewart Jr., has said she never smoked, never drank, didn’t need glasses and only reluctantly agreed to wear a hearing aid.
Tillman was born November 22, 1892, on a plantation near Gibsonville, North Carolina, where her father had been born into slavery and where her parents and grandfather were sharecroppers, according to interviews she gave the Glastonbury, Connecticut, Historical Society for a 1994 newsletter.
She was one of 23 children in the family, some of whom died at birth or in infancy. Many of those who survived displayed longevity almost as notable as Tillman’s, including a brother who lived to be 108, a sister who reached 105 and two others who reached 102.
Tillman’s family moved from North Carolina to Glastonbury in 1900. She was the only black student in her high school when she graduated in 1909, but said she never experienced discrimination there whether she was in class, churning butter for a local family or playing shortstop on a town baseball team.
“In Glastonbury, I didn’t know if I was white or black,” she said in 1994. “People were just fine, even way back then, to me. They treated me just like everybody else.”
Tillman worked as a cook, maid, party caterer and caretaker for several wealthy Hartford-area families. She later ran her own baking and catering service whose regular customers included Dr. Thomas Hepburn, a noted Hartford Hospital urologist and father to actress Katharine Hepburn.
