Mother’s Lost Wedding Ring Returned To Daughter 55 Years After Parents Die in Plane Crash [Video]
Joyce Wharton’s parents died when their small plane crashed in a forest in Washington state some 55 years ago, and never thought she would receive a phone call from a stranger telling her he found her mother’s wedding ring.
The plane went down and disappeared in 1959, and it took an additional 14 years to find the wreckage, but even then the ring was never recovered and was thought to be lost. This week Wharton, received a phone call from Nick Buchanan, a logger in Centralia, Wash., who had stumbled onto the ring in 1997 and connected it to the 1959 crash, according to ABC News affiliate WABC-TV
“I never once thought it belonged to me,” Buchanan told Q13 FOX News. “I just was hoping that there was a daughter or a family member that I could turn it over to.” For nearly 20 years Buchanan had been looking for a family member so he could properly deliver the ring. With his nephew’s help, Buchanan used Ancestry.com to find Wharton, who is from San Antonio, but now lives in New Jersey.
“He was determined that he was going to give it back to a daughter or family member to give it back to,” Wharton said after she spoke with him earlier this week.
After a few conversations to ensure that Wharton was the right recipient, Buchanan mailed the ring and Wharton got it back on Wednesday.
“It was almost like reaching out to touch my mom,” Wharton told ABC News. “It was like reaching out to the past because the last time I saw the ring it was a couple of weeks before they left” on their flight. Wharton’s parents Hazel and Hugh Armstrong, from San Antonio, Texas, had been on their way to see family when the plane crashed. Wharton was just 23 at the time and newly married.
“Just in your heart you’d like to have your mother’s wedding ring,” Wharton said. “Something so special to your mom and dad. After all those years you don’t think it’s ever going to be possible.”
Wharton said she found it especially touching that she was able to get the ring back during the holiday season. “To get that phone call out of the blue… It’s hard to find adjectives, because you’re so full emotionally,” she said. “It renews all those thoughts of my mom and my dad. It was just wonderful.”
Both Wharton and Buchanan feel that they have experienced a miracle and that miracle will bond them together forever. Read about another lost wedding ring and it’s happy return in a story reported by The Inquisitr.
