J. Candace Clifford was a noted lighthouse historian and author. While serving as the historian of the U.S. Lighthouse Society, Candace contributed significantly to the planning and building of this research catalog from it's beginning.
"The entire lighthouse community and those interested in maritime history will always owe her a debt of gratitude for the amazing amount of research she accomplished in her lifetime" notes the Lighthouse Digest.
After graduating with a degree in history from Hamilton College in New York, she took a job with the National Park Service Maritime Heritage Program coordinating lighthouse preservation activities. She turned an early assignment to compile an inventory of U.S. lighthouses into a published book, 1994 Inventory of Historic Light Stations.
With unparalleled knowledge of the National Archives lighthouse section, she was a critically important consultant to the National Park Service Maritime Heritage Program from 1988 to 2001, and was primarily responsible for its databases, resource surveys, and inventories, ultimately producing the first Historic Lighthouse Preservation Handbook.
She was a prolific writer, and coauthored several books with her mother: , Nineteenth Century Lights, Maine Lighthouses, A Documentation of Their Past, Mind the Light Katie, and Lighthouses Short and Tall. She was also the coauthor of Great American Ships.
More recently she hosted her own website dedicated to lighthouse research. Here are several articles written by J. Candace Clifford she had posted to her website related to lighthouse history.
She passed away August 15, 2018 at her home in Alexandria, Virginia after a battle with brain cancer. She was 57 years old.