The oldest living person in the United States has died at the age of 114.
According to Reuters, a South Carolina woman, Mamie Rearden who was born when William McKinley was president of the United States and had ranked as the oldest known living American for just over two weeks died on Wednesday, January 2.
Mrs. Rearden died at a hospital in Augusta, Georgia, about 20 miles south of her South Carolina home.
According to her youngest daughter, Sara Rearden, Mrs. Rearden had recently broken her hip and was having difficulty breathing earlier in the week.
Sara Rearden said:
"I was looking right at her when she took her last breath."
Rearden was born on September 7, 1898, in Edgefield, South Carolina, where she was raised and lived all her life, her daughter said. She was a school teacher early in life, but after getting married and starting a family she left the job to become a homemaker, and went on to have 11 children in all.
She obtained her first driver's license at age 65, and at about the same time became a case worker for an anti-poverty program, according to her daughter. Her husband, Oacy Rearden, died in 1979 at the age of 88.
Rearden lived by her Baptist faith. Her daughter said:
"She was the type who would say, 'Do unto others as you want them to do by you,' and later she changed that, which is interesting, to 'do unto others as they ought to do by you.'"
Even at 114, Rearden was more than a year younger than the world's oldest person, 115-year-old Jiroemon Kimura of Japan.
Robert Young, of the Gerontology Research Group, said Mamie Rearden's September 1898 birth was recorded in the 1900 US Census. The group, which verifies age information for Guinness World Records, listed Mrs. Rearden as the oldest living US citizen after last month's death of 115-year-old Dina Manfredini of Iowa.
Mrs. Rearden held the title of the oldest woman for only 16 days before her death.
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