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CHESHIRE, Mass. – The fifth-oldest person in the world and Massachusetts’s oldest resident has died.
Bernice Emerson Madigan, of Cheshire, died at a Williamstown nursing center last weekend. She was 115.
According to the Gerontology Research Group, she was the fifth-oldest person in the world.
Madigan had said her secrets to a long life included a positive attitude, no children, a hot breakfast, glass of wine, and a spoonful of honey every day.
Madigan was born in West Springfield in 1899 and moved to Cheshire in 1906. After high school graduation, she got a job at the U.S. Treasury Department and moved to Silver Spring, Maryland, where she lived until moving back to western Massachusetts in 2007.
Her husband, Paul, died in 1976.
A funeral is scheduled for Saturday.
