A method of deleting tombstones early includes setting an initial-flag in a first record in the storage system, setting a delete-flag in a second record in the storage system, selecting a set of one or more records in the storage system to be written to an extent of the storage system in a merge operation, each of the one or more records being associated with the first key, and performing the merge operation, wherein the second record is not written to the extent during the merge operation based at least in part on a determination that the first record having the initial-flag set is the oldest record in the set and the second record having the delete-flag set is the newest record in the set.