BOSTON — A toolshed at a Slippery Rock campground was an unlikely place to dig up remembrances of a decades-old shipwreck that killed seven New England fishermen.

But there they were, two black ship lamps, forgotten among the rusted tools Den Hickey was sifting through this spring, deciding what to throw out.

Gold-lettered writing covered the back of both lamps, but only one inscription was legible: “INCA. ... Lost at Sea January 13, 1944,” with the names of the men who died on board.

It’s unknown whether these lamps are originally from the Gloucester-based Inca, a 72-foot dragger that sank without a trace off Virginia after being rammed by a steamer. And perhaps it’s unlikely they were.

To Hickey, though, the lamps were at the least a tribute to the fallen fishermen, and he believes they belong to the surviving family members, if they want them.

Nancy Kinghorn, whose father, Vincent Orlando, was lost on the Inca when she was 9, said she has no idea whether the lamps are somehow from the ship or who wrote on them, but she wants to know more about them.

Nearly 70 years later, Kinghorn’s memories of the wreck and her father are vivid, especially when the weather darkens over Gloucester Harbor, not far from where she lives. It took a long time, she said, to accept he wasn’t coming back.

“For years, I used to just say, ‘Oh, he’s going to come up the hill now, with a fish wrapped (in) a piece of newspaper. ... He’s going to come home,” Kinghorn said.

The Inca left Gloucester for its final trip in December 1943, heading to winter fishing grounds off the mid-Atlantic. After seven days of fishing, its hold was full and the vessel headed to port in Phoebus, Va. But before it got there, it was gone, plowed under the bow of a steamer.

“The steamer had swooped down upon the smaller craft in the dark hours before dawn, and apparently sent her to the bottom, leaving no immediate trace of wreckage or bodies,” the Gloucester Daily Times reported at the time.

Kinghorn, the youngest of 12 children, heard “ungodly screams” one day from her house. She rushed inside to see her mother screaming, pulling her own hair and scratching at her face. She’d just learned the bodies of two crewmen from the missing Inca had been found in another vessel’s nets, confirming the Inca’s fate.

The lamps’ history can be traced back only as far as a day in the late 1980s when Hickey’s brother-in-law, Don Britton, left $30 at an untended yard sale in coastal New England and took the lamps, intrigued by their looks and lettering.

The lamps eventually traveled with Britton to a family summer camp in Slippery Rock, where Britton meant to install them but never did.