I found the forgotten cemetery my ancestors are buried in

I was cleaning out old screenshots, and I found one from 2018 that had a relative from ~1860. It was back when I was curious about my family tree in high school, but didn’t do much research. I spent an hour googling names and scrolling through findagrave and ancestry.com listings, connecting dots. The furthest I can trace it back at the moment is someone from 1803, he may be the first generation born in the US instead of Ireland.

Someone uploaded a photo of his tombstone, he died at just 31. It’s a tiny illegible stone just barely sticking out of the soil, the dead leaves trying to hide it. I looked at other photos in the cemetery and the whole place is abandoned. Graves are leaning, some toppled over. The place is overrun with thick, old trees. No one visits it, no one tends to it. I believe the last body buried there was in the 1920s, so why would anyone go back?

Numerous headstones have been identified by a single user. And about ten share my last name, many not mentioned on any of the ancestry websites, many are children that didn’t make it.

It’s an odd feeling, I can’t describe it. I don’t know these people, frankly I don’t care about them. But the people that are the reason for my being here today are just bones in a forest, a quarter mile from a lonely country backroad in South Carolina. I knew my family was from the south, my grandpa was from Florida and my grandparents lived in Georgia for ages. But we’re from South Carolina, Georgia has a century of my family history. I’m glad I’m a Midwesterner now, they made the right choice moving north. I definitely identify with my Midwestern maternal side of the family much more than the Southern paternal.

In the next few days, I think I’ll research more and make my own tree. I’m done for tonight, I can only stay on my phone avoiding sleep for so long. I hope to be able to track back to at least my first US-born relatives. I know on this side of the family, we’re Scottish/Irish. Maybe I’ll do my mom’s side too, explore more of the German/Irish/Eastern European parts. I know my great grandpa snuck over on a ship from Yugoslavia, so maybe all that history’s not going to be easy to find. Anyway. Goodnight.