It was a sunny day in October when Milton electrician Scott Schaeffer first spotted the leaf-covered park on the corner of Kent and Dover streets in Rehoboth Beach. After he finished lunch, he noticed that he had an extra 30 minutes of free time. The tree-filled plot seemed a little too tantalizing for the amateur metal detector hobbyist to pass by.

Following the faint beeps of his White’s Prizm metal detector, he combed the grounds not expecting to find much. It did not take long, though, before he uncovered several coins and metal buttons buried beneath the first shallow layer of soft ground.

Explaining that he normally finds about $150 of loose change per year at his hobby, Schaeffer noted that at first, the park yielded nothing out of the ordinary. That is until his machine’s signal steadily began to grow louder at the base of a large holly tree.

Digging seven inches under the ground, Schaeffer uncovered a man’s 10-karat gold ring adorned with a blue stone in the center.

“It took me a little while to clean it off, but when I did, I noticed that it was someone’s class ring,” said Schaeffer. “When it was completely cleaned off I saw that it said ‘Rehoboth High School 1965’.”

The inside of the piece of jewelry gave further clues to the owner, explained Schaeffer, who pointed to the engraved initials “W.R.S.” While this wasn’t much information to go on, Schaffer began the search for the owner of the 43-year-old ring.

“If I found something that didn’t have any initials on it, I would probably keep it,” he said. “But this was different because I knew I could probably find who it belonged to.”

Combing resources from libraries, the internet and local police stations, a handful of people who heard the story from the Milton man also helped in the search. “I even needed to get a new library card,” laughed Schaeffer, who continued the mission despite several false leads.

But soon enough, a call from a local police station would put him on the right track.

Schaeffer found out that the original owner, Walter Sutherland, was a former local fire company employee and resident of Rehoboth Beach. The house where he lived for over a decade was located less than a block away from the plot of land where Schaeffer found the ring.

Now living in Naples, Fla., Sutherland was both excited and baffled about the recent discovery. He noted that the ring had been lost for more than 40 years after he misplaced it during a playful neighborhood snowball fight. After a futile weeklong search, Sutherland gave the ring up for lost and never expected to see it again, he said.

While he hasn’t made the trip back to Delaware yet to retrieve the lost heirloom, he states that he is looking forward to seeing it once again.

“There are some pretty strange things under the ground that you would never expect to find,” said Schaeffer, who has been combing local venues with his metal detector for the past five years. “Finding the owner of a lost item is even more unusual.”