The journey to find my grandfather started back in 2017 or thereabouts when I decided to find his identity for the first time.

Tony Tran, Slate's senior tech editor, didn't have much information to go by.

His grandparents met in Vietnam during the war. And growing up, I never knew who he was and my mom never knew who he was

because her mom, my grandma and her had lost contact with him shortly after the war. And my grandma

was very, very hush-hush about who he was, like very cagey.

Tony's grandmother left Vietnam not long after the war and was always pretty quiet about

the specifics of the man she fell in love with.

We knew some things.

We knew that it was an American soldier who served in Vietnam during the mid to late 60s and left in the early 70s.

And I always wanted to find his identity, and it wasn't until I embarked on this genealogy project.

Was I able to find him?

Part of the way Tony did that was by using the website findagrave.com.

The site is a vast repository of information, pictures of headstones, family photos,

little memorials to the dead.

Throughout the process of looking for his identity and trying to find out who he was,

I would find different like find a grave memorials and pages.

And it always came across my mind, like, what if I found him on one of these websites one day? And I really kind of pushed that thought

away, because in my mind, I really just wanted to find him alive. So when it did come to the point

where I discovered his find a grave page and his obituary and found out, yes, indeed, he had died back in 2013, I was, I'll be honest, I was like, I was heartbroken.

Tony couldn't meet him, couldn't introduce his mom to her own father, but he could do something else.

It wasn't until a few years later was I able to make a trip down to where he was buried in Houston, Texas, a small town outside of Houston called Leggett.

I remember pulling up to this churchyard

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