A few years back, I discovered my 3rd-g-grandparents' graves, along with a couple of their children, dating from 1800, in the Old Washington cemetery near Maysville, Mason Co., KY. They were in pretty bad shape, and I suspect that I was probably the first relative of theirs to lay eyes on their gravesite in at least 50 years, if not more. Anyway, I eventually arranged to have some work done by the local caretaker, at my own expense, and he did a great job of resetting the broken stones, evening up the head and footstones, and making the site look really nice. And it stayed that way for about three or four years. Last week, on a trip through the area, I was really disappointed when I stopped at the cemetery and found one of the headstones broken off at ground level again. I know that this can happen just from the lawn-mowing equipment, but it was strange that both the headstone and footstone of this particular grave were both broken off (it's harder to break a footstone since it's much closer to the ground). So what happened? I have no idea, but my first inclination is to just let it go and figure that no monument made by man is going to last forever, and at least I made an effort. I have seen this for other preservation efforts as well. There's an old cemetery in Fleming Co., KY, that was cleaned up very nicely by a local historical society, but then with lack of funding and manpower it has grown back over in the last few years. Very discouraging, but what can one do? Doug Gordon