This week, I made a quick trip to visit family in South Carolina. We had a few hours to go do something and I realized that we were just 45 minutes from the cemetery when James Holden is buried.

My dad was a good sport and drove us out to Buffalo, Cherokee, South Carolina, while rain clouds tried to take over the sky. Exiting the highway, we found ourselves on country roads with occasional houses doting the landscape.

We found the church on a curve in the road, the church in the center with cemeteries on both sides of the wide parking lot. Parking near the section that looked older, we pulled up the photo on FindAGrave looking for landmarks. Luckily we found one: a modern headstone with a metal plaque. We scanned the graveyard and within a few moments spotted the headstone near the tree line.

Walking over we scanned other headstone, most equally as old, and headstones that have worn into jagged stubs.

Standing in front of the headstone, I took the usually pictures of the it and the graveyard around it, but after a moment, I stopped to really look at it. My heart seemed to say, “I found you.”

Genealogy has a broad scope and infinite possibilities for research, but really it’s about piecing together bits of information to understand one person’s story. It is a connection between past and present to a person that is one of the reasons you exist.