A Pennsylvania woman who recently celebrated her 114th birthday is being recognized as the oldest living person in North America — and credits her very long life to abstaining from everyday vices.
Naomi Whitehead, who was born in 1910 — before the sinking of the Titanic, replaced Elizabeth Francis as the oldest person in North America after she died at 115 on Oct. 22, according to LongeviQuest, a database on the world’s oldest people.
Francis was the third-oldest person in the world at the time of her death.
Whitehead has credited longevity to abstaining from smoking and drinking, but says good genes also played a role – her father lived to his 90s, The Sharon Herald reported.
She is currently the seventh oldest person in the world, and has 12 grandchildren, 28 great-grandchildren, 49 great-great-grandchildren and three great-great-great-grandchildren.
She has outlived a dozen siblings, her husband, Sylvester Whitehead, who died in the 80s, and her three sons.
She never remarried after her husband’s death.
“I said if I loved him, I would never get married again,” she told the outlet.
She recalled the number of major events she has lived through which included the Titanic sinking, the civil rights movement and the 1918 flu pandemic.
Whitehead, who now lives in a senior living community, was born on a Georgia farm, she told the newspaper last year on her 113th birthday.
“I picked cotton and tobacco,” she recalled of the years she spent on the farm before moving to Sharon, Pa.
The supercentenarian – someone reaching the age of 110 – spends her time cooking, baking, drawing, listening to music and sharing stories.
“She’s a Godly woman,” her grandson, Dan Whitehead, told the newspaper. “She is truly blessed.”
These days Whitehead has difficulty walking but enjoys being pushed around the care center she resides at.