The Trouble With Tribles

Yeah. I went there. Deal with it.

It is not often that Old Br'er manages to notice or know something his father doesn't. And it is all the better when it is something about the Old Man's stomping grounds. Such was the case recently when out on a run through the hinterlands near the family cemetery he 'inherited' a while back.

It is important to note that this area - and stretch of road in particular - is an area Poppa Br'er has scampered past innumerable times over the past several decades. This is not one of those 'only been there once or twice' places, no. 

So you can imagine the Old Man's reaction when Br'er noted a small cemetery a few feet off the road. It was so shocking that the Old Man turned around to go back and look at it closer. Now this ended up with his backing into a ditch and getting stuck (and needing towed out). But that is a longer and more delicious tale for another time.

Well, the Old Man's curiosity was piqued enough that today he packed up the landscaping tools and we headed back to the site. 

An hour later the six graves were cleared and visible again for the first time in what appears to be many years.

The "Before"

The "After"

To be honest, we could have made a wiser choice of days to take this on. Think 'Muggy'. Not sauna hot, but warm and extremely humid.

But it was our good deed for the year. I don't know if there are even any descendants or relatives that know about, or even care about, these few little graves. Still, we staved off Entropy for a little while.

All this manual effort pales in comparison to the Find A Grave clean up I face!

Find A Grave not only has 2 - count'em - 2 duplicates for one of the graves (meaning serial de-duplication submissions), but there are two versions of the cemetery and all the graves themselves, too! Worse, the version with the correct GPS coordinates is the duplicate. 

So I have to get all the graves themselves de-duplicated so that *one* of the cemeteries is empty. THEN I have to submit one cemetery update and one deletion to get the surviving cemetery (with the surviving graves) updated with the correct GPS coordinates. 

Best case these updates take several days to get done. Worst case, they take a couple of weeks.

And these people are not even relatives!

Oh! To cap the whole title pun thing, the duplicate names are spelled "Tribble". So be glad I did not go with "The Trouble With Tribbles". I was kind enough to not Spock your imagination.