The grandniece of Kathleen Snavely, the oldest living Irish person who died in New York state on Monday at the age of 113, attributed her long life to hard work, love, family and the odd Manhattan cocktail.
Mrs Snavely was 113 years and 140 days when she died at a nursing home in Syracuse, her hometown since leaving Ireland as a 19-year-old immigrant in 1921.
Born on February 16th, 1902, Kathleen Hayes Rollins Snavely was 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, Co Clare, she was listed on the 1911 Irish Census as an eight-year-old scholar. Her father Patrick (42) was described as an agricultural labourer and there were three other members at her family home: mother Ellen and her sisters Anna May (9) and Lena (1).
A successful businesswoman, she founded and ran a dairy in Syracuse with first husband Roxie Rollins. She outlived him by 47 years and her second husband Jesse Snavely by 27 years.
She also outlived some of her second husband’s children. She had none of her own but had an extended close family.
"She was a pull-yourself-up person," her grandniece Donna Moore told 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, Mrs Moore said: “Her spirit, hard word and two good loves - she two wonderful husbands, a wonderful family and maybe the occasional Manhattan.”
Kathleen arrived in New York on September 30th, 1921 on the ship, the Scythia, from Queenstown, now Cobh, in Co Cork, according to the immigration records at Ellis Island, then a hub for new emigrants.
Two world wars and 18 presidents
She married Mr Rollins, a young cook, in 1924 and they opened the Seneca Dairy in 1933 during the depths of the Great Depression. She lived through two world wars and 18 American presidents.
Mrs Moore said she and her husband Bruce met her grandaunt for the last time in April. Still business savvy at the age of 113, Mrs Snavely chided 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 said. “She always had a laugh.”
Her grandniece said that Mrs Snavely continued 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 said. “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.”
