The life of Elizabeth Bolden and her 567 descendants

In the year Elizabeth Bolden was born, Bram Stoker began writing Dracula, America had fewer than 45 states, and Wilhelm II — Kaiser Bill — had just become Emperor of Germany.

On Monday, Mrs Bolden, the world’s oldest person, died in a US nursing home at the age of 116 and 118 days, leaving behind a very different world to the one she was born into on August 15, 1890.

Known as “Lizzie”, Mrs Bolden must have had a rather long shopping list at Christmas time. She had 40 grandchildren, 75 great-grandchildren, 150 great-great grandchildren, 220 great-great-great grandchildren and 75 great-great-great-great grandchildren.

She was born on a cotton farm on August 15, 1890, in Somerville, Tennessee, the daughter of freed slaves, but more than 70 years before blacks in America would be given the same voting rights as the white population.

Guinness World Records recognised Mrs Bolden as the oldest person in the world after the death in August of Maria Ester de Capovilla of Ecuador at 116 and 347 days.

Mrs Bolden married Lewis Bolden in 1908 and bore the first of seven children in 1909. Only two were still alive last year: “Queen” Esther Rhodes, 89, and Mamie Brittmon, 86.

In the 1950s she was widowed and, after suffering a stroke in 2004, spoke little in the last years of her life and slept most of the time, her family said.

She died at the Mid-South Health and Rehabilitation Centre in Memphis, Tennessee, a nursing home where she had been living for several years.

Emiliano Mercado del Toro, 115, of Puerto Rico, is now thought to be the world’s oldest person. Moses Hardy, believed to be the second-oldest man in the world and the last black US veteran of the First World War, died last week at the age of 113.

The oldest person ever is believed to be Jeanne Louise Calment. Born in France on February 21, 1875, she died on August 4, 1997, aged 122 years and 164 days.

One of Mrs Bolden’s grandsons, James Bolden, travelled from the Philippines last week to visit his grandmother. “She was always very family-orientated,” he said. “She gave good advice and the family listened. She was a hard worker, and a farmer for most of her life.” One of the relatives of Mrs Bolden, the former Memphis police chief James Bolden, told a local newspaper several years ago that even at 100 she was mentally sharp and had an ability to remember details that was “simply amazing”.

She was clearly quite a fiery matriarch. A reporter for the Memphis Commercial Appeal was researching a feature article on Mrs Bolden when she turned 112. During one incident witnessed by the newspaper, one of her daughters kept trying to cover her with a blanket, which her mother found annoying.

“If you weren’t my child, I’d put you over my knee and whoop the [expletive] out of you,” she barked.

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