The parish committee that oversees a small cemetery in west Quebec says it will no longer re-cycle old tombstones.

That committee is responding to outraged relatives of people buried in the cemetery who found that old family plots have been resold.

In some cases, the old names and dates were sanded off tombstones, and the names of the new owners of the plots put in their place.

That happened to two grey tombstones that held a prominent spot overlooking St. Antoine de Padoue cemetery for more than a century.

They used to belong to the ancestors of Martin Cullen, who keeps track of his family history in a scrapbook. It's a good thing he does, because he can no longer read the names or dates on the tombstones.

"The people who were buried there were key to our history, and to treat them with such disrespect just doesn't make any sense," says Cullen. "It's like taking a sheet of our history and throwing it away."

On Tuesday the director of the committee in charge of the cemetery says he realizes that was a mistake.

Daniel Boileau also promises that he will find a new home for a couple of other gravestones that were dumped in the bush.

In many provinces a portion of the burial costs are set aside to keep up the grave site forever. That's not the case in Quebec. After the standard 99-year lease is up, neglected plots and even the gravestones that sit on them can be resold.

At large cemeteries there isn't the space crunch faced by smaller cemeteries like St. Antoine du Padoue, where they've run out of plots.

As required by law, cemetery officials did put a notice in the local newspapers. It served notice about grave sites that had fallen into arrears, and warned that the plots might be resold.