forwarde from alt.obituaries Ann McFadden is a detective of death Mon, Nov. 12, 2007 BY ANA VECIANA-SUAREZ Looking for details about your great-grandfather's death 45 years ago? Searching for survivors of the friendly neighbor who died without a will? Can't find your long-lost cousin's grave? Ann Josberger McFadden is the woman for you. She is a sleuth, a sort of detective of death, a woman who has read and indexed thousands of published obituaries and researched the unusual history of a handful of South Florida cemeteries. For fun. ''I didn't mean for it to become a big thing,'' McFadden says with a little shrug. ``I just started, and I had more free time and. . . .'' Her voice trials into a smile. Seconds later, when prodded, she admits it also takes persistence to read tens of thousands of obituaries on microfiche and then painstakingly catalog each one by the deceased's last name, age, cemetery and date of death. Actually, it takes more than persistence. ``You need a lot of patience, absolutely.'' Husband Nelson McFadden chuckles from a corner of the couple's West Miami-Dade living room, where he is reading a magazine. ''Yep, a little patience,'' he chortles. ''And how do you say it in Spanish? Muy loco en la cabeza.'' Very crazy in the head. McFadden, 74, fell into this research by accident. As a child she didn't care much for history. ''My grandmother lived with us for 25 years, and I never asked her a single question about her family,'' she recalls. But back in 1980, McFadden's brother recruited her in his search for family roots. As a high school graduate with no specialized research skills, she wasn't particularly interested, but she also had a lot of time on her hands. Her seven children were grown. McFadden's brother didn't last long in the endeavor. ``He quit after a month, and I'm still at it.'' Tracing her roots led McFadden to Philadelphia where she was born and spent her first 12 years. When she tried to get a copy of her great- grandfather's obituary, however, her request and the $5 fee were returned because there was no index of obituaries and no one to do the research. Figuring Miami had the same problem, she took it upon herself to index obituaries from The Miami Herald, Miami News, South Dade News Leader and Miami Times. She began with 1940 to 1950 -- and never stopped. 'Word got around that I was doing this, and I started getting calls for obituaries from other years. Somebody needed to find a person who had died in 1960 or 1970 or 1935. And so I said, `Oh, why not do all of them?' '' She now has about 120 years' worth of records. In the process, McFadden became something of a fixture at Miami's downtown Main Library, completing a 4,000-page obit index that is regarded as a marvel. She expands it every year. ''We get a lot of requests for obituaries,'' says Renee Pierce, genealogy manager for Miami-Dade Public Library, ``and if we didn't have Ann's work or an exact date for the person, we could be reading microfiche for months and maybe not even find it.'' Pierce, who has known McFadden for 20 years, adds that the would-be genealogist has little use for attention and accolades. ''Ann's a real gem,'' Pierce says. ``You sit her down in front of the computer, and she goes to town.'' McFadden also has indexed local adoption, military and probate records and has compiled a short history of a handful of local cemeteries, including Palms Woodlawn in Naranja, Miami City Cemetery on Northeast Second Avenue, Pinewood in Coral Gables and Woodlawn North on Southwest Eighth Street. Along with other local historians, she contributed to Miami Diary, 1896: A Day by Day Account of Events that Occurred the year Miami became a City. McFadden's latest challenge was to index, by topic, the Agnew Welsh Collection for the public library, more than 220 books of newspaper clippings kept by a former newspaper editor on a variety of local subjects. The project took three years. When the library insisted on paying her, she charged 55 cents a page, for the 762 pages: $419.10, quite a bargain, given that each page took six to seven hours to compile. ''Well,'' she says, ``I wasn't doing it for the money.'' McFadden's quiet, matter-of-fact diligence has won other fans. ''She's done a phenomenal amount of indexing that makes our job 100 times easier,'' says John Shipley of the library's Helen Muir Florida Collection. ``Ann is my hero.'' When Coral Gables police asked for help to find the correct location for a tombstone that had been discarded on the street, she used the name of the deceased to track down the cemetery where the marker belonged. When someone from up North needed information about the last residence of a long-dead relative, a well-known poetess, McFadden not only found its Miami Beach location but also trekked over with a friend to take pictures of the 1920s house because it had a poem etched into the driveway. She used shaving cream, a trick she had learned during her research wanderings, to make the words stand out. So what about her own journey back into history? Has she found anything interesting? ''Well,'' she says, ''my ancestors were all pretty common folk. My mother's family comes from Ireland and my father's from Germany, and they were very poor.'' But she has had fun traveling to churches and cemetery offices to research their marriages and deaths. Ironically, McFadden doesn't often traipse through cemeteries. The information she needs can be found in ledgers and books, and she's been to her parents' graves only two or three times, usually when she's at the cemetery anyway for a burial. She doesn't understand why relatives fuss over misplaced remains because ''I choose to remember my loved ones in a different way, like right here.'' She points to her head. What's more, she wants to be cremated. ''Land is already being filled up,'' she says in her characteristically offhand way, ``and I don't think it [burial] is really necessary.'' http://www.miamiherald.com/tropical_life/story/303804.html -- Steve Hayes E-mail: hayesmstw@hotmail.com (see web page if it doesn't work) Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/famhist1.htm http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7783/