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Syracuse University Archives
# RIP
Kathleen Rollins Snavely, Ireland's oldest woman, dies at the age of 113
The former businesswoman lived through two centuries, two world wars and the Great Depression.
THE OLDEST IRISH-BORN woman has died in Syracuse, New York.
Kathleen Rollins Snavely, who was 113, passed away on Monday.
She was born in Feakle, County Clare, in 1902.
Kathleen had been a business apprentice in Dublin and Limerick before she emigrated to the US in 1921.
She worked in a department store and state school before founding dairy company Seneca Dairy with her first husband, Roxie Rollins, who she married at the age of 22.
The business employed 40 people in Syracuse.
She married a second husband, Jesse Clark Snavely Jr, after Roxie died in 1968.
In 2000, she donated $1 million to the Syracuse University School of Management in memory of her first husband.
Kathleen was the 16th oldest person in the world at the time of her death, according to the Gerontology Research Group.
She was living in the Centers at St. Camillus, a retirement homes in Syracuse, when she died.
David Liddell, her longtime lawyer and friend, told The Syracuse Post-Standard that Kathleen had a “razor sharp” awareness of the world around her.
“She was a person of humble beginnings who achieved an elegance in life few of us will see again,” he said.
