What started out as a quest to find out where the woman in the old family photo — her great-grandmother — was buried led Olivia J. Garland to a thicket in eastern Henrico County that, with the help of chain saws, loppers and mowers, revealed a lost family history and an emotional link to the past.

And her great-grandmother’s gravesite.

“When I saw her headstone, I was so thrilled and I thought, I’ve got to clean this place up,” Garland said. “I can’t let her grave sit here in the middle of the woods and snakes and everything else.”

To clean up the site, Garland organized a band of volunteers that has taken to calling itself the Friends and Families of the Battlefield Park Road Family Cemetery. The group has cleared enough of the overgrowth from the old cemetery to find 19 graves and believes there are more in the area that will require additional work as well as research of historical land records, Garland said.