Kathleen Hayes Rollins Snavely, the world’s oldest ever Irish-born woman, dies on July 6, 2015, at the age of 113 years and 140 days in a nursing home in Syracuse, New York, her hometown since leaving Ireland as a 19-year-old immigrant in 1921. Her grandniece attributes her long life to hard work, love, family and the odd Manhattan cocktail.

Born on February 16, 1902, Snavely is the 16th oldest person in the world at the time of her death and the sixth oldest in the United States.

A native of Feakle, County Clare, Snavely is listed on the 1911 Irish Census as an eight-year-old scholar. Her father Patrick (42) is described as an agricultural labourer and there are three other members at her family home: mother Ellen and her sisters Anna May (9) and Lena (1).

A successful businesswoman, Snavely founds and runs a dairy in Syracuse with her first husband, Roxie Rollins. She outlives him by 47 years and her second husband, Jesse Snavely, by 27 years. She also outlives some of her second husband’s children. She has none of her own but has an extended close family.

“She was a pull-yourself-up person,” her grandniece Donna Moore tells The Irish Times. “She came over to a whole new world at 19 and left everything she knew and loved behind.” Asked about the secret of her aunt’s long life, Moore says, “Her spirit, hard work and two good loves – her two wonderful husbands, a wonderful family and maybe the occasional Manhattan.”

Snavely arrives in New York City on September 30, 1921, on the Scythia, from Queenstown, now Cobh, in County Cork, according to the immigration records at Ellis Island, then a hub for new emigrants.

Snavely marries Rollins, a young cook, in 1924 and they open the Seneca Dairy in 1933 during the depths of the Great Depression. She lives through two world wars and eighteen American presidents.

Moore says she and her husband Bruce meet her grandaunt for the last time in April 2015. Still business savvy at the age of 113, Snavely chides her grandniece for not selling another relative’s house more quickly to avoid the costs of holding on to the property. “She yelled at me for not selling the house,” she says. “She always had a laugh.”

Moore says that Snavely continues to check her financial statements on monthly visits from her lawyer right up to her death. “She was a wonderful lady, sharp as a tack,” she says. “She was very quick-witted and a very nice, very caring person. Everybody liked her. She just had a way about her. It is the end of an era in our family.”

(From: “Oldest Irish person Kathleen Snavely dies a 113” by Simon Carswell, The Irish Times, http://www.irishtimes.com, July 7, 2015)