Canada Woman, 116 And Counting, Makes Guinness

SWM, 81, seeking pretty lady. Call Mom for appointments.

Like any other mother, Marie-Louise Febronie Meilleur worries about her boy’s future - so she’s scouting the old-age home where they live to fix up her 81-year-old son with a suitable mate.

That’s typical of the 116-year-old Canadian woman whom the Guinness Book of Records named Thursday as the world’s oldest person. She hangs tough, relatives and caretakers say.

“She’s a person who really wants to live, and she’s a fighter, ” said Muriel Boissonneault, a health care worker at Nipissing Manor Nursing Care Center in the northern Ontario town of Corbeil.

“The reason, I am sure, she is so well is she’s a good eater and drinker,” Boissonneault said.

Meilleur has spent nine years at Nipissing and has made a project out of fixing up her son, whose birthday was Thursday, according to services coordinator Irene Pellerin.

“She was telling him there were a lot of pretty girls and she was going to find him a wife,” Pellerin said.

Age finds Meilleur almost totally deaf and blind, which ruled out telephone interviews with her Thursday about her new status as a world record holder.

Meilleur has documents to prove she will be 117 this month, so she gets the title last held by Jeanne Calment, who died this month in her native France at the age of 122.

Meilleur, who was born on Aug. 29, 1880, has been married twice and has about 300 descendants.

Her family said the secret of her long life was hard work and keeping active: She used to enjoy fishing and still loves the outdoors. She also is a vegetarian.

Jean Bosse, one of Meilleur’s 75 living grandchildren, said recently his grandmother had the reputation of being “a woman with a lot of character … She wasn’t someone you could push around, not a submissive woman at all.”

She was born Marie-Louise Febronie Chasse in the town of Kamouraska, Quebec, 95 miles east of Quebec City.

Guinness verified her age through her certificates of birth and baptism, census records, two marriage certificates and other documents.