(Cross posted at the Daily Kos)

This Labor Day weekend, while many Americans were enjoying the last holiday of the summer, I was keeping a promise made last year to a girl I never met and who died 97 years ago. While others were taking advantage of sales at the mall or feasting on barbecue with friends and family in their back yards, I chose to clean the grave of a martyr of the American labor movement and our Democratic party who, sadly, no one remembers. Not even her family. So if you need a short break from obsessing about Sarah Palin, I invite you to join me this Labor Day in remembering Beckie Neubauer.

It was just about a year ago when I first identified her grave at Baron Hirsch Cemetery in Staten Island, NY. Beckie was one of the 146 workers who perished in the infamous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. For nearly a year I had searched for them in a effort to create the first accurate list of their names. As hard as this may be to believe, no one had ever done this before. The city of New York had not done it in 1911. None of the newspapers of the day had done it and, remarkably, no historian had succeeded either. The most recent effort to determine their identities, conducted by journalist David Von Drehle in his 2002 book, "Triangle, the Fire That Changed America", I found to be wrong more than 50% of the time.

So, last year I set out to see if I could find them from information contained in their vital records, census records, immigration records, death records, burial records and grave sites. The list which I have created, and continue to expand upon, was read this year at the City of New York's annual Triangle Fire memorial ceremony and for the very first time, Beckie's name was pronounced correctly. The newspapers had reported her surname as Nebrerer or Nieberer. Even her death certificate used the wrong name.

Beckie is buried far in the back of an old and long closed burial society at Baron Hirsch Cemetery in Staten Island. Baron Hirsch is famous for two things; outrageous acts of anti Semitic vandalism and the most extraordinary infestation of Poison Ivy in the New York area. The rear of this burial society was so untended and overgrown that it took me 3 visits to the site before I was finally able to locate the grave last winter. Beckie was literally entombed under perhaps 50 years of vine growth. Crawling on my hands and knees and using a mono pod to spread the thick vines obscuring the inscription, I was finally able to know her true last name; Neubauer.