Besse Cooper

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Besse Cooper celebrating her 116th birthday.
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Besse Berry Cooper (maiden:Brown;born August 26,1896-December 4,2012) was an American supercentenarian who was the verified oldest person from June 21 2011 to her death.Cooper is the eighth oldest verified person and also the eighth person to reach the age of 116 or more,after Chiyono Hasegawa's death she became the last verified person born in 1896.She is also one of the three people to have lost the title of the oldest person but later regained it,the other two being Elizabeth Bolden and Jeanne Calment

Life,education and career

Besse Cooper was born as Besse Brown Cooper  in Sullivan County,Tennessee,on August 26,1896,she was third eldest of the eight children born to Richard Brown(1861-1932) and Angeline Berry (1866-1927).As a child she was a scholar who read constantly,she graduated from East Tennessee State Normal School,which is now known as East Tennessee State University in 1916 at the age of 20,and then worked as a teacher in Tennessee before moving to Georgia and worked as a school teacher in Between,Georgia until her first child,Angeline was born in 1929.She married Luther Cooper (1895-1963),a farmer.She had four children with him-Angeline (b.1929),Luther Jr. (b.1932),Sidney (b.1935) and Nancy (b.1944).Luther died at 68 in December 1963,after the death of her husband,she lived alone in the farm until she moved into a nursing home at the age of 105 in c.2001.