This is why we document cemeteries!

This lovely Sunday morning I was busy grinding up yet another load of pears to make pear sauce, when a friend of our family, Gail, called the house to talk to Mom. Mom got off the phone and informed me that the cemetery in the Douglas State Forest, one of 24 cemeteries which was covered in the cemetery documentary which I helped with, had been vandalized. Vandalized! This is one of the worst nightmares of all people who protect cemeteries, second only to a cemetery being dug up completely by construction equipment (we've had a few close calls with that in the past). I informed my mother that I had to go see the cemetery and take pictures, and asked if there was a police report. Our friend had already reported it to the police. My mother told me that I could go to the cemetery once some work was done, so I put a bucket worth of pears through the fruit squisher while Mom went to work calling the town Cemetery Committee officials and anyone else whom she found relevant to the event.
When I was done I drove down to the forest and met up with Sue, a resident of the area and fellow open space committee member. From there Sue and I surveyed the damage. Initially it didn't look that bad, stones were still upright and there was no spray paint. However, people had scratched offensive images and stuff onto two of the slate stones, and someone had dug up an area and re-filled it. You can barely make out the depression in the ground, its on the right hand side in front of the stone with the rounded top. All this damage had been done prior to the last few rains, as it was clear that rain had fallen on the fairly fresh dirt. Whoever dug up the area used a shovel. The area had not been dug deep enough to uncover anything, if there even was anything left in the grave to uncover. All I could say to myself was "WHY?"
It was not until I returned home to look at pictures of the cemetery prior to vandalism that I realized some significance of the hole. As you can see in the before picture, there is a square stone in the right hand foreground that reads "Selena" on it, and a smaller stone behind it which is her footstone. It stands in exactly the same area that had been dug up. Selena's headstone has been moved off to the left and back a bit and is now facing the wrong way, but upright. Her footstone is now in front of her headstone and standing upside down (as seen in in the previous picture, to the left of the depression in the ground).
The grave belongs to a girl by the name of Selena Kimball who died in 1822 at the age of 2 months and 20 days, her parents are buried in a different cemetery, likely meaning that the infant died of smallpox victims of smallpox were often buried apart from otherwise healthy dead people because of superstition, and there was a smallpox epidemic in Douglas in the 1820's.
I'm so angry, someone dug up this girl's grave and haphazardly rearranged her stones. But had it not been for older pictures such as this one (there are a few, this one was taken by username Svadilfari on Flickr.com) we would not have known where her stones and grave are supposed to stand. This is one of the reasons it is important to document old cemeteries.