This summer has been a rough one! The heat really hits me hard, much more so than when I was younger so getting out to do some digging is far and few between this time of year. With the weather finally subsiding a bit, my excitement to get back out swinging was boiling over and so I decided to meet up with my hunting partner Greg of Finding America on Youtube for an early morning hunt and it turned out to be an amazing hunt at that! We met at a spot we have hunted several times before, where finding silver coins, early V nickels, and Indian Head pennies have surfaced as well as tons of Victorian and Edwardian era brooches and other costume jewelry.

We decided to hunt a spot we had not previously spent much time on, near the main road where an old victorian home once stood. We soon realized there were signals at about every swing, mostly mid tones on our Equinox 800’s. We love mid tones, as so many different and neat relics and tokens fall into this category that were skipped over through the years by previous hunters looking only for silver coins. I was using the Coiltek 14” x 9” coil on my Equinox for the very first time, I usually use the 6” Minelab coil on the machine so it felt a little awkward swinging a larger coil but I soon became comfortable with it, swinging a bit slower and letting the coil do the work for me.

My first signal was a screw cap, jumping 17-19 on the VDI. The second signal was a solid 12, usually meaning a nickel in the ground. I plunged my Lesche into the dry, crumbly soil and sure enough, a crusty nickel popped out. After brushing the dirt away I saw it was a 1941, a nice early Jefferson to start the day and my oldest coin in several weeks! After a few more “unidentified metal objects” were dug up, I was talking to Greg while swinging and got a nice sounding 15-16 on the machine. It was reading about 4 inches down and as soon as I flipped the plug, I saw the golden outline of a circular object, it immediately dawned on me that it was a ring and I hollered for Greg to come over. I was ecstatic and was trying to not just pull it out before he got the camera running. Once he was over the hole, I pulled it out and pushed the dirt through the ring, rubbing the top and it glistened back at me in the sun. This was old gold, it had that look of aged gold that had been in the ground a very long time! Cleaning out the inside, I noticed a depressed karat mark but couldn’t quite make out the number next to it. As I turned it around, I saw a cursive inscription, “ Timmie to Jennie”. It was an inscribed wedding band that unfortunately only had the first names of the original couple. Going back to the K, I sprayed some water inside and was startled to see it was in fact 18K, a very high gold content, in fact the highest Karat of Gold I had ever dug!

The ring weighs exactly 4 Grams and is beautiful. It will be in my collection for a long time to come, I love personal items and if by chance I ever find out who it originally belonged to, I would like to locate the family if they still remain. Judging by the 18K and no makers mark, it is most likely early 1900’s, perhaps a bit earlier. We continued to swing for a few more hours until the sun really came back in full force and ended up with some amazing things in that small area! Nothing like getting back into the swing of things with a little gold! Video of the ring and other relics and coins from that hunt can be seen on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingAmerica.