I live in southbay also. Is this lodge coed? My father, grandfather and great grandfather were all free masons in new orleans. Being a female I wasn't sure I could join. How would I go about finding a lodge that is accepting of women? My family has passed on, but I do have a few membership cards of theirs that does show their lineage in the organization. Thank you so much.
If you want to follow in the family footsteps the way to go about it is to find an Order of the Eastern Star chapter or Order of the Amaranth chapter near you. Regular lodges are male only and have been since the system was founded three centuries ago and that's the system that your family was involved in. Male only lodges have mixed auxiliary orders that include women and those are the Star and Amaranth. You may find your mother, grandmother and/or great-grandmother were members of one of these orders. This is the path your ancestors would expect you to take - They made promises to be loyal to this system.
That's not the only option. Just as the world has both horses and zebras, the world has regular lodges with the system I described built up around them and the world has orders that revolted and splintered away in the past. Some families have a long history of being rebellious. Only you can say if your ancestors would smile on you for taking this path. If they were the rebellious sort it can be about the "spirit of the law versus the letter of the law" so they may care more about your spunk than about exactly which order you approach.
But be cautioned - If you want to be active the Star and Amaranth are vastly larger than the tiny zebra groups. There's a female only lodge that meets in (Hollywood, maybe North Hollywood) and a CoMason lodge that meets San Francisco. You might have to go to Chicago to get to the next one. Join the Star or Amaranth and you'll drive past several just to get to the nearest zebra lodge. Zebras are wild and pretty and so on but there aren't many of them around on this continent.