A grandfather’s beach walk in Barnegat Light with his visiting triplet grandsons turned up “treasure” of a historic and memorable kind. They found a bronze plaque explaining a shipwreck that’s going to keep on answering a lot of other families’ fascinated questions of “what is that mast sticking up out of the 11th Street tidewater?”

Currents have shifted sands around the relic for decades, generations now, and a lot of Long Beach Islanders don’t know the history buried underneath.