This is how I spent a large chunk of my day today.  I drove to Oakwood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, to clean up my Barnett grandparents' grave site. The top picture shows you what it was like when I arrived and the bottom picture shows what it looked like when I left.  At first, I couldn't actually tell there was a tree in there. 

In the bottom picture, you can see the top of a neighboring tombstone in the midst of the bushes that wasn't visible initially.  I didn't get to excavate it, because I had my hands full with my family's plot.  I did remove the grapevine from the bush on the far right, which should help keep it away from all of these. But more probably needs to be done.  I would like to remove the tree, but it was too big for my clippers to handle.  I'll have to see how it turns out.  I'm not sure what kind of tree it is.

The picture below shows all of the debris that I cut away...more than I bargained for! I bagged up two bags of vines and smaller branches & was trying to figure out what to do with the big pieces when a cemetery employee drove up with a small backhoe and a shovel on the front.  We loaded the rest of the debris in the shovel & he disposed of it.  Thank goodness!

Afterward, I stopped in the cemetery office and asked if I could see any records they had on the plot.  The woman in the office was terrific!  She looked up the plat & I took the picture below. It shows that my grandfather, John Graham Barnett, purchased the plot on 9 December 1918, a day after his sister was buried there.  Eventually, he & his wife, his mother, and another one of his sisters were buried there, as well as his step-daughter's mother-in-law (Maggie Hawkes).

The woman in the office noted that he paid 30 cents a square foot.  She said the rate now is about $24 a square foot. She also gave me maps of the cemetery sections that an individual had prepared for them. Thank you, Mike Bordonie! And thanks to my friend, Maria, for suggesting that I blog about this.