Decades after losing her class ring, Barbara Wielage's ring was found 1,300 miles away from Wielage's home in Nebraska by a hobby metal detectorist, Andrew Ciffer.
Ciffer had found the ring in the sand at the beach in Belmar, New Jersey. With only the clues on the ring to go by, Ciffer tracked down the owner so that he could return the ring.
The ring had Barbara Wielage's initials, the school, and the class year on it. With that information, Ciffer contacted the Crete Public Library, where the assistant director, Laura Renker, was able to help him with his search.
Renker told KLNTV,
It's really fun. It's kind of a unique situation. But it's really fun to have been a piece of the puzzle to try to figure out where this came from.
Renker was able to connect the metal detectorist to the Crete Public Schools Foundation, who further connected him with a member of the class of 1966, who was able to figure out who the initials belonged to.
Wielage's sister, Sandi Wielage-Roche, told KLNTV,
We still have no idea how the ring got there.
Though Barbara did at one point live in Boston, even then, she was still a long way off from the New Jersey beach where Ciffer found the ring earlier this year.
Despite the uncertainty about when the ring was lost or how it ended up in New Jersey, the long-lost ring made it back to Crete, Nebraska, thanks to the kindness of a random dude with a metal detector.
Wielage-Roche went on to say,
Of course it's the 'ooh' and 'aah' of it. Number one, for this young man to take it upon himself to do this is monumental. So, yes, we do have the ring, and after all that time, it didn't even suffer any damage.
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