Marie-Louise Meilleur

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2007)

Marie-Louise Meilleur
Born	August 29, 1880(1880-08-29) Kamouraska, Quebec
Died	April 16, 1998 aged, &0000000000000117.000000117 years, &0000000000000230.000000230 days Corbeil, Ontario
Cause of death	Diabetes

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

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

The supercentenarian 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.

By the time Meilleur died of a blood clot at age 117 in April 1998 in Corbeil, Ontario one of her sons was also living in the same nursing home, and her oldest living daughter, Gabrielle Vaughan, was 90 years old. She was said to be a vegetarian, while fellow 117-year-old American Sarah Knauss, her successor as world's oldest recognized person, had a weakness for junk food.^{[citation needed]}

A decade after her death, Meilleur still remains one of the five oldest verified persons ever recorded (she is the fourth-oldest person ever if the questionable case of Shigechiyo Izumi is discounted).