Marie-Louise Meilleur

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Marie-Louise Meilleur
Marie-Louise Meilleur at age 117
Born	August 29, 1880 Kamouraska, Quebec
Died	April 16, 1998, aged 117

Marie-Louise Fébronie Chassé Meilleur (August 29, 1880 – April 16, 1998) was the French-Canadian who, upon the death of Jeanne Calment, became the oldest recognized person in the world.

She was born in Kamouraska, Quebec, and married her first husband, Etienne Leclerc, there in 1900. After he and both her parents died in 1911-1912, in 1913 she left two of her four surviving children behind and moved to the Ontario border. Only once, in 1939, did she return to the Kamouraska area.

She had six further children by her second husband, Hector Meilleur, whom she married in 1915. After his death in 1972 she lived first with a daughter and then in a nursing home in Corbeil, Ontario.

By the time she died of a blood clot in April 1998, one of her sons was also living in the same nursing home, and her oldest living daughter, Gabrielle Vaughan, was 90 years old. Meilleur was said to be a vegetarian while Mrs. Sarah Knauss, her successor as world's oldest recognized, had a weakness for junk food.^{[citation needed]}