It sounds very frustrating! There is an upside to these kinds of communities when someone does start an initiative. I went to a small local cemetery searching for my relatives 150+ year old headstones. It was an absolute mess. There were animals burrowing all over the place, homeless people sleeping there, and gravestones falling over. I found out that a local genealogical society had been formed and they had an initiative for the cemetery. They had catalogued the entire cemetery, found matching newspapers articles for the dead people, taken pictures of headstones, then removed the headstones to storage for safekeeping. They took all this information, then published a book with all this information. It even included a CD of all the pictures! Keep searching out there. You never know if you'll run into an amazing local resource for this information.