As we head back down the hill, Bob is waiting for us by the road with a surprise. He pulls two maps from his truck: one, dated 1911, has the lighthouse clearly marked, while one from 1930 shows buildings at the same site but does not name them. Len and Myrna are both excited; the maps are further proof that the lighthouse was located at the site pinpointed by the consultant. They’re also surprised that they have never seen these maps before, since they have been looking high and low for every bit of evidence they can find. “Nobody asked me,” Bob shrugs. They had been in old public works vaults all the while.

Our last stop is the old Navy cemetery to visit the graves of Kate and Charles McDougal and their daughter Kate and her husband. Len says that when he was here years ago, the cemetery was so overgrown with weeds that he stopped at the police station to complain. When he told the officers he’d just been looking for a gravesite, one of them exclaimed, “That place is loaded with rattlesnakes!” Today it looks (mostly) tidy, shaded by towering eucalyptus, with here and there a palm tree. Flowers have been placed by some of the grave markers. We spend a moment at a lovely monument to the sailors from the USS Boston who died in 1892 in an explosion near the ammunition depot while preparing shells for the ship. Kate’s daughter Betsy, who was nearby with the horse and buggy, helped ferry the wounded to the hospital and was later commended by the Secretary of the Navy for her bravery.

Len retired from the Navy in 1972 and began seriously researching his family history in 1974, after his grandmother died. “I never got around to sitting her down and grilling her, which I regret,” he says. He began collecting snippets of information from notes she had written--including those on photos and in the margins of books--then progressed to searching through military and other historical records, even visiting the National Archives in Washington, D.C. A few years ago, Su, a project manager at the Coastal Conservancy, gave him family tree-maker software for Christmas, which gave his efforts a real boost. Two books, Women Who Kept the Lights, by Mary Louise Clifford and J. Candace Clifford, and Guardians of the Golden Gate, by Ralph Shanks and Lisa Woo Shanks, have also helped him find information about Kate and her family.

As we’re leaving, I ask him when he first began to take an interest in his grandmother’s old stories. “Way too late,” he says, shaking his head. “She used to go on and on and on. . . . You don’t pay any attention to what grandmother’s trying to tell you.”

For information on outings and events at the proposed regional park or elsewhere on Mare Island, go to www.sfbayflywayfestival.com or call (707) 649-9464.