Elizabeth Bolden

Biography Elizabeth Jones was born in 1890 in Somerville, Tennessee to formerly enslaved parents.

She married Louis Bolden (18921955) in 1908 when she was eighteen and he was sixteen, and their first child, a son, James Ezell Bolden, Sr. (23 September 191018 September 1986) was born two years later when she was twenty and he was eighteen. Elizabeth and Louis Bolden had three sons and four daughters and raised cotton and subsistence crops on farmland near Memphis until the 1950s.

Bolden outlived another son, John Wesley "Wes" Bolden (16 December 19158 October 1983), who died at the age of 68, two daughters, Ethel Bell Riddick (191213 September 1935), who died at 23 and Annie Pearl Trice (21 June 192515 April 2001) who lived to the age of 75, as well as a grandson, James Emil William Bolden, Jr. (8 August 19303 October 1998), the eldest-born of her late eldest son, Ezell, who was 68 years old at the time of his death.

Only two daughters were living at the time of Bolden's death in 2006, Queen Esther Rhodes (born 1917), who died in 2007 at age 90, and Mamie Brittmon (born 1920), who died aged 102 in 2022. At the time of her 116th birthday in August 2006, Bolden also had 40 grandchildren, 75 great-grandchildren, 150 great-great-grandchildren, 220 great-great-great-grandchildren and 75 great-great-great-great-grandchildren.

Later life

In her final years, Bolden resided in a Memphis nursing home that she had lived in since she was 109, and was described by her family as unable to communicate. They requested that media attention (such as interviews and visits) be limited. While she was the world's oldest person, Bolden was rarely seen in public.

She was photographed for two different books in early 2005, and was featured in Jet magazine in May 2005 and the Memphis Commercial Appeal in June 2005. For her 116th birthday, new photographs were released for the first time in almost a year, and her family said that she was looking forward to her birthday. This was officially confirmed on September 17, 2006, by Guinness World Records.

After her death, Emiliano Mercado del Toro became the world's oldest person.