Diana Steele's oldest son learned how to read, write and do math problems in a cemetery. He sounded out names on headstones and subtracted dates of birth from dates of death to determine ages of the deceased.

Brian, now 8, romps around a cemetery as other children would a playground, armed with a squeegee and a can on shaving cream.

His brother Adam, 4, is quickly learning the tools of the trade.

"My husband still doesn't know what to think of me," said Steele, who has earned the nickname ~"The Cemetery Lady" from school children she has enlightened on the history buried in their own back yards. "He's still trying to figure out what he married."

Steele began traipsing through cemeteries at an early age, led by her grandfather.

"We would go around on Decoration Day (Memorial Day) and clean the headstones, pull the weeds and pick up trash," she said. "And as we made our way through the cemetery, he would tell me about the people buried there -- who they were, how they got here and what they did.

"I guess that always stayed with me," she added. "It was just a natural step for me to start doing this."

In a high school sociology class, Steele was assigned to put together a three-generation chart of her ancestors.

"I thought I was so cocky," she remembered. "I came back with about 100 names and dates.

"But so did everyone else," she said. "You see, everyone in the town was pretty well related to one another."

But Steele took the experience to heart, and later in life would build it into a dream. First, though, there was the matter of working as a nurse to put her husband through medical school.

"When we moved to Cape Girardeau about a two and a half years ago, for the first time in my life I didn't have to work," she said. "So I've been on maternity leave for four and a half years now."

As a rule, when she and her family moved to a new community, Steele joined the local genealogy club. And Cape Girardeau was no exception.

Her activities with the club led her to St. Mary's Cemetery, which she said, "cried out to me, `Do me, do me.'" Two and a half years later, she finished a book on the people who lay beneath the earth, in rows facing east, in the old St. Mary's Cemetery.

"I found out some of the most fascinating things," she said. "You wouldn't believe the stories that lay right here."

During a jaunt around the cemetery one day, Steele said she noticed a grave marker standing alone, with flowers at its base. There was no date of death listed on the stone.

So Steele thumbed through the phone book, until she found a person with the same last name.

"I called her and asked her about this person whose name I saw engraved on the marker," said Steele. "The woman I talked to knew all kinds of information about the person, her history and her family.

"But then I asked her about the date of death of the woman," Steele said. "Then she said, `Oh honey, that's me. I put flowers on my grave because I know no one will be around to do it for me after I'm gone.'"

Steele said she never felt like such a heel in her life.

"But when I see that woman's obituary in the paper, I'm going to go to her funeral, because no one else will," she said. "She's the last of her family."

On another day, Steele was walking in a section of the cemetery known as "Babyland" or "Stillborn Row."

"There was no marker, just a last name," said Steele. "It was kind of a unique last name, so I found someone with the same name and called her.

"The woman I talked to couldn't remember any babies in her family that died -- at least not recently," she said. "Then I told her that the baby must have died in 1959 or 1960."

As it turned out, the woman had gone into labor after carrying the baby only five or six months. At the time, Steele said, it was customary for the hospital to have the child buried, without telling the mother.

"She wanted to know if that was her baby," said Steele. "So I did some checking, and found out that sure enough, it was.

"It was so awkward for me to give her news like that, but it provided closure for her," she added. "We're friends now. Whenever she sees me, she tells people, `this is the lady who found my baby.'"

Steele's own children accompany her to cemeteries after school, on weekend trips or even on the way home from shopping.

"Some people would say our whole family was kind of morbid, but I'm proud of my kids," she said. "They are getting a sense of their past; their history, on the brink of their futures."

One of the things Steele admires about cemeteries -- new or old -- is the intricacies and beauty of the monuments.

"There is just so much history right here," she said. "From the dates on the headstones, you can see when epidemics like TB or polio swept through the area."

But Steele's one pet peeve is people who vandalize cemeteries and headstones. "I just have no patience for that at all," she said. "It's so senseless. So horrible."

Steele's other passion is genealogy. She has done her own family tree, traced the lines of people buried in cemeteries long ago, and she continues to find out about those who came before. She's traced her own line to a family who came to America and settled in Kentucky, where they traveled with Daniel Boone.

"When I go into a cemetery, I don't just want to walk it or index it, I want to know about the people buried there," she said. "I want to know their stories. They have so much to tell."

She shares her knowledge with just about anyone who wants to listen.

"I love telling these stories," she said. "That's part of the reason I wrote the book.

"We can learn so much from people who have lived before us," Steele added. "All we have to do is to listen."

Steele knows how and where she wants to be buried.

"I would like to have a four-plot, with my husband, and a huge headstone," she said. "Then at the foot of our graves, I would want to have a bench placed facing the headstone -- so everyone could read my epitaph. I'm going to have a great epitaph."

But until that time comes, Steele will walk with the living and devote her spare time to the revival of the dead.

"If I bumped into you on the street today, I would recognize your face, but I probably couldn't remember your name," she said. "But if you were dead and I saw your headstone, I could probably tell you when you died, who your relatives were, what church you belonged to and what you did for a living.

"I suppose my brain just overloads or something," she said. "But this is my passion."