Family members thought she was 115 years old, but records show that Chicagoan Virginia Call was about 111 when she died on Tuesday.
In any case, she was the city's oldest registered voter and arguably its oldest resident.
In January 2008 she made an X on a voter registration card so she could vote for Barack Obama in the Illinois presidential primary. She lived long enough to see him become president.
The Chicago Tribune reported that Call, a South Side resident, died at 5 p.m. at Provident Hospital. A grandson, John Paylor, said she had been in the hospital for 11 days before she died.
It has been difficult to verify her family's claim that she was indeed 115, which would have made her one of the oldest people in the world.
In November, when the then oldest person in the world died, an investigator from the Gerontology Research Group, which keeps tabs on the oldest people in the world, looked into Call's case and could find only a census record from 1910 with the woman's maiden name, Virginia Green. It said she was 12 at the time, which would have put her age then at 110.
Funeral services are pending.
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