A wedding ring lost in an Ohio front yard nearly 50 years ago has finally made its way back to the family that thought it was gone for good.
The discovery came 13 years after Jeff Arnett’s father died—and after more than a decade of Jeff returning to his childhood home hoping to complete a request his dad had made before his death.
Jeff found the 14-karat white gold band Aug. 16 in Swanton, Ohio. On Aug. 28, People reported that Arnett’s father, John Arnett, had lost it sometime between 1977 and 1982 while washing his car in the family’s front yard.
The timing made the find even more remarkable. The family no longer owned the house, and its new owners were preparing to sell it, potentially making this summer one of Jeff’s very last opportunities to search the yard for the lost treasure.
The Search Ended Just Minutes After It Began
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John searched extensively after the ring disappeared. “He got on his hands and knees, and he went all over the yard,” Jeff said, according to WTOL 11. “He hunted and hunted for it and he couldn’t find it.”
About a year and a half earlier, he had brought the missing ring up again. According to an Aug. 29 report from The New York Times, he asked his son to return to their old home with a metal detector someday and see whether he could find it. (John died in 2013 at age 78.)
Jeff began looking that fall with a borrowed metal detector, and the search quickly proved much harder than he expected. Decades of repairs had left plenty of other bits of metal like nails scattered through the yard, and later searches turned up roughly 150 objects. Just no long-lost wedding ring.
This year, two of Jeff’s siblings gave him a better metal detector. With the house destined for a sale, he returned Aug. 16 for one more fateful try.
Five minutes later, he finally found it
Before starting this particular search session, Jeff said a prayer asking for help finding the ring.
Within about five minutes, his detector picked up something some eight inches beneath the ground.
At first, Jeff wondered if the object might simply be costume jewelry. Then he brought it to his 90-year-old mother, Carol, who immediately recognized her late husband’s ring. The family then confirmed it by comparing the band with photographs from John and Carol’s 1957 wedding.
The most emotional part was yet to come: Jeff took a moment to slip the ring onto his own finger. “I realized my dad was the last one to have it on his finger and I’m the first person to put it on my finger,” he noted, as reported by The New York Times. “And I realized that’s the closest thing to touching my dad again.”
Carol saw something particularly special in this rediscovery. “I believe that he led Jeff that day right to that ring,” she said, according to WTOL 11. Jeff now plans to keep the ring in a box on his desk beside one of his father’s watches.