MARYVILLE, Mo. (AP) - Mandi Brown has a passion for cemeteries, and, by combining the skills of a historian, detective, preservationist and genealogist, she has dedicated a large portion of the last 50 years to combing graveyards - sleuthing out their secrets and ensuring the final resting places of the dead are maintained with honor and dignity.
Over the decades, the longtime Maryville resident has rescued scores of graves from obscurity, taking her skills and commitment for marker preservation to all 48 contiguous states, the Maryville Daily Forum reported.
In Maryville's two largest burial grounds, municipally owned Oak Hill Cemetery and privately operated Miriam Cemetery, Brown and a small group of fellow volunteers have rescued nearly 70 gravesites, where aging markers had sunk into the ground, tumbled over, been hit by mowing equipment or simply fallen victim to time and the elements.
This summer, Brown said she hopes to restore 14 grave markers at Oak Hill, which was established by the city in the 1870s. She's not sure how much work needs to be done at Miriam, which is somewhat older and larger, saying only that "a lot more" graves there remain to be found or restored or both.
For nearly two years, Brown has been working as a volunteer with the city of Maryville to help compile a compete record of gravesites at Oak Hill. Aging books filled with written burial records have now given way to a GIS database, which is available to the public through the office of City Clerk Sheila Smail.
Smail said Brown has put in countless hours helping locate and restore graves and has sometimes been able to assist people enquiring about lost gravesites using the centuries-old practice of dowsing. Dowsers use metal or wooden rods said to twist in the hand in ways that indicate the presence of water, metal, oil, gemstones, graves or just about anything else underground.
But, Smail said on at least one occasion - an out-of-town request with regard to the burial location of a great-aunt who died as a toddler - Brown was able to dowse a possible child's gravesite in an Oak Hill plot where a number of people from the same family are buried.
Using a pair of L-shaped metal rods sharpened at the tip for probing into the ground, Brown claims to be able to determine not only the location of a grave, but its length and whether the person buried there is male or female.