World’s oldest person dies for the second time in two weeks

HARTFORD, Connecticut (AP) - Emma Faust Tillman, who became the world's oldest known living person last week, died at a nursing home on Sunday. She was 114.

Tillman, the daughter of former slaves, died Sunday night, said Karen Chadderton, administrator of Riverside Health and Rehabilitation Center in East Hartford.

"She went peacefully," Chadderton said Monday. "She was a wonderful woman."

Chadderton said several family members were with Tillman when she died.

Tillman, who was born during the administration of President Benjamin Harrison. Her reign as the world's oldest person was short-lived; she assumed the title January 24 with the death of 115-year-old Emiliano Mercado del Toro of Puerto Rico, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. (Full story)

Yone Minagawa of Fukuoka, Japan, was born January 4, 1893, and is known as the world's oldest living person, Guinness said.

Tillman, who lived independently until she was 110 years old, was deeply religious since childhood and always attributed her longevity to God's will, friends and family members said.

"She has a lot of faith and says, 'Whatever the good Lord wants is what will happen,"' Chadderton said recently, after Tillman was recognized as the world's oldest known woman.

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.

She married Arthur Tillman in 1914, and they raised two daughters in Hartford before his death in 1939. One of her daughters is deceased and the other, Marjorie, was her caretaker and a constant presence with her at the nursing home.