Lost Engagement Ring Found after 60 Years

From the Genesee Country Express, 21 May 1942.

Wayland - Mrs. Alma Walker, now almost 89 years old, who lost her engagement ring over 60 years ago, has had it restored to her by her grandson, Erwin Walker II, who found it this week while operating a tractor on the farm which has remained continuously in the Walker family.

Mrs. Walker was, as she now recalls, working butter and her ring - on the first finger as was then the custom - annoyed her. She handed it to her three-year-old son Erwin I to keep for her. Both forgot the ring temporarily, and later it could not be found.

Just this week when her grandson, also named Erwin, was operating the tractor, he was the gleam of the gold circlet. Evidently the first Erwin had lost it when going into the field where his father was presumably ploughing - and so through the years it had rested in the “good earth.”

The ring is unharmed in any way and the inscription “Willie” is as legible as when the young man’s grandfather rode horseback to Dansville to have his name engraved thereon for that is what Alma Snyder, then 16, desired on her ring. They were married Dec. 31, 1875 - and the little lady recalls that New Years was a warm and lovely day.

That Erwin Walker I, now deceased, grew to manhood and had several sons, the youngest of whom is his namesake, and who found the ring and restored it to his grandmother, placing it on the first finger as she held it up. But the ring, now a bit too snug, as she fondly looked at it and him, she returned to him because - “Well, I wanted to know now that he has it.”

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