Man's Quest Is to Find Ancestral Graveyard in Fort Totten Halt! Advance and give the countersign! So began an 1895 article in The New York Times detailing how William Wilkins was prevented from visiting his ancestral graveyard in Fort Totten, then a Queens military base, by a sentry at the gates. The fort, Mr. Wilkins insisted to no avail, had once been his family's rolling farmland and the cemetery on it was still his. It had been retained, he said, by a special provision set out when his father sold the property, which was eventually bought by the military before the Civil War. More than a century later, Tom Loggia, Mr. Wilkins's great-grandnephew, is continuing the family quest to seek out and memorialize a cemetery that he steadfastly insists lies unmarked on the land. His goal, which he has been pursuing for years, is to erect a monument or marker to replace the vanished headstones of what he says are up to 30 members of an extended family and their neighbors. But history repeats itself, sometimes with eerie symmetry: About a decade ago, on Mr. Loggia's first try, he was turned away by a guard at the fort's gates, he said. Fort Totten was decommissioned; parts of it were turned into a city park, while the Army, the Coast Guard and the New York Fire Department control the rest. Officials there remain skeptical that the graveyard exists. "We have received no definitive evidence of a family grave site in Fort Totten," said Zachary Feder, a parks department spokesman. There is a gravestone at the site - for Charles A. Willets, the man who bought the property from Mr. Loggia's family and sold it to the military. Even so, Mr. Loggia, 55, a wiring specialist who lives in Hopewell Junction, in Dutchess County, with his wife and three children, has continued an on-and-off effort that has sometimes been complicated by his quixotic approach. "People should acknowledge things of importance," he said. By some estimates there are thousands of bodies entombed under public parks in New York City. Some are marked by monuments, like the Revolutionary War casualties buried under a hill in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, while others have no headstones and lie in what were once so-called potter's fields, like Washington Square Park. Some cemeteries have been lost to time; others have been rediscovered. "They are easy to neglect if no one is watching," said Robin Prinzhorn, the president and founder of the New York Historic Cemetery Preservation Society, a volunteer organization. Sometimes if they are out of sight, they are out of mind. At first, Mr. Loggia's only proof of the cemetery's existence came from childhood yarns spun by his grandmother. But shortly after his first fruitless attempt to pass the fort's gates, he lifted up a small picture of his mother and watched as a sliver of paper spiraled down from the frame. On it, in his grandmother's handwriting, were instructions on how to find a record of the 1829 deed of sale, which he unearthed in the basement of the office of the Queens Registrar, in Jamaica. The cemetery was listed on the document, but the deed gave no indication as to its location on the property. "When you see clues like this, how can you not continue the search?" he said during an interview at the Bayside Historical Society, a castlelike former officers" club on the Fort Totten grounds, while sitting alongside a son, Travis, 20, and several other family members. Since then, Mr. Loggia has driven to Albany several times to make his case, armed with a sheaf of photocopied documents as evidence, randomly knocking on elected officials" doors in the Capitol. He has also written to government agencies and an assortment of politicians. "My husband and I are totally out of politics," reads a handwritten response from Barbara Bush in 2006. As the effort has spanned decades, his family - including his wife and children - have at times expressed concern that he does not know when to stop. Then, two years ago, he received a letter from an Atlanta woman whom he had never met. Her name was Elizabeth Knowlton and she had read his postings about his search on the message boards of a Web site devoted to tracing ancestors. Folded with her note was the 1895 article in The Times, which gives the rough coordinates of the cemetery. "I think the story is plausible, based on historical deeds and documents," said Paul DiBenedetto, the president of the Bayside Historical Society. As he has amassed evidence to support his case, Mr. Loggia's family has begun to come around. "He's been talking about it forever," said Travis Loggia, who added, his voice breaking, "He's doing an amazing thing here." Mr. Feder, the parks department spokesman, said that despite frequent correspondence with the agency, Mr. Loggia had not shared the records he secured or sent a formal request to search the area since he narrowed down the location to a five-acre patch. But Mr. Loggia, sometimes so overcome by emotion that he was unable to speak, promised to continue his effort. The reason for his passion, he said, was the deaths of both his parents when he was in his 20s. The idea of forgetting the dead, he said, even 200-year-old ancestors, is deeply painful. "Maybe nobody will ever go visit them again," Mr. Loggia said. But really, that's not the point. The point is they existed.