Good Samaritan returns 1966 Crete High School class ring found in New Jersey

CRETE, Neb. (KLKN) — A Crete High School class ring from 1966 was unearthed after having gone missing for years.

Almost 1,300 miles away, Andrew Ciffer found the ring with a metal detector in Belmar, New Jersey.

“We still have no idea how the ring got there,” said Sandi Wielage-Roche, the sister of the woman who lost her ring.

Ciffer decided to research who it might belong to using the only identifiable marks on the ring, and eventually contacted the Crete Public Library.

“On the further outside, there are her initials. There’s a B, and there’s a W,” said Roche, while describing the ring. “Through that little amount of information, he and his friend were able to come up with Crete, Nebraska, and the class of 1966.”

The ring turned out to belong to Barbara Wielage.

Laura Renker, assistant director at the Crete Public Library, answered the call before she passed the message on to the Crete Public Schools Foundation.

“It’s really fun,” she said. “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.”

Executive Director of the foundation, Marilea Thiem, called Jane Fahrnbruch, who graduated from Crete in 1966.

From there, Fahrnbruch contacted Sandi Roche, whose sister has the same initials as those on the ring.

“Of course it’s the ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ of it,” Roche said. “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.”

Fahrnbruch and Roche reached out to Ciffer to extend their gratitude for returning Barbara’s ring, despite having no idea how it ended up in New Jersey.

“It does show that there’s good in people and that they’re willing to follow through with a neat, sentimental type of thing,” Fahrnbruch said.

Roche said her sister lived in Boston for a period of time, but she still doesn’t know how far of a journey the ring took.