A Wisconsin woman is trying to figure out a bit of a mystery that appeared in her mother’s storage unit, that being just why and how a 1970 Shurtleff School class ring ended up in her mother’s things.
Deborah Davenport contacted the Record last week to see if the paper knew anything about the Shurtleff School and whether the proper owners from a class ring from 1970 might be found. Davenport said she found the ring in a storage unit in Wautoma, Wisconsin amongst her mother’s things. No one in her family, including her mother, has any connection to Chelsea, she said, and she had never heard of Chelsea until she found the ring.
“It’s bizarre because my mother had several storage units and we were closing them out and found this ring,” she said. “She did flea markets for 30 years and bought and sold at markets for a long time out here. We were wondering how in the world this ring got here. At first, I thought it was a girl’s name. I thought her name was ‘Chelsea Shurtleff,’ but then I looked it up on the Internet and found it was a school in Chelsea, Massachusetts.”
The Shurtleff School in Chelsea no longer exists.
The 1970 class ring was made my O’Neil Company and is sterling silver with a green stone. She said there weren’t a lot of markings on the ring, but someone in Chelsea might have more of an idea, she said.
She said there was another class ring in the unit, but it was from a nearby town and Davenport was able to locate the owner. Doing so 1,000 miles away was a more daunting task, so she reached out to the Record for help.
“I don’t know how it ended up here, maybe someone from back East moved here and it got mixed up at a market,” she said. “I thought about selling it for the silver, but I’d rather try to find the owner, or just give it to the School Department and they can keep it as a piece of history. Oddly enough, it was the same year I graduated.”
Anyone who has any information or questions about the ring can contact [email protected].