After nearly half a century at the bottom of the ocean, a Canadian university graduate’s lost gold class ring has been returned to him. Frederick Morgan Perigo lost the class ring back in 1977 and now it has been successfully retrieved. The reunion was made possible by Alex Davis, an enthusiast for lost items who found the ring while scanning the seabed with a metal detector. The discovery eventually set off an international tracking effort to return the heirloom back to its original owner.
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The separation occurred during a family excursion to the ocean with his wife, and their two young sons. While wading into the water, a sudden powerful wave knocked his youngest son off balance. As Perigo jumped to the boy's rescue, the ring inadvertently slipped from his hand. Perigo said in an official statement that he never had time to react before the ring was gone. He and his family searched the water for it in the moments after, according to CBS News, but had no luck and assumed at the time it was lost for good.
A post-hurricane recovery lead to the discovery
The storm that may have possibly exposed the ring wasn't a minor squall. According to the National Hurricane Center's report , Hurricane Beryl was the earliest record of a Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic basin. Subsequently, Barbados was put under a hurricane warning as the storm passed through the Windward Islands in July 2024. Davis has theorized that this violent storm activity had washed away the coastal sediments, ultimately laying bare years of submerged items under the sand including the graduate's long-lost memento.“So areas where it was like a beautiful sandy beach, suddenly you can see all these rocks exposed,” Davis explained. “With that sort of in mind, I was like right, are there some areas now I want to go to where they seem like a lot of sand has been pulled out?”
While scanning through an area littered with vintage coins dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, Davis’s underwater detector triggered an alert, prompting him to dig through dead coral and rocks before he saw the flash of gold. Despite having been vulnerable to shifting sands and seawater for 47 years, the ring’s structural framework remained intact. Upon inspecting his find, the diver noticed three identifying markers: Perigo’s school name, the graduation year of 1965, and his initials, “FMP”.
An unexpected package on a birthday
In order to locate the owner of the ring, Davis wrote a digital message along with pictures of the jewelry to the administrative staff at McMaster University in Hamilton. The task was complicated by the fact that in the university's alumni database Perigo was registered under his middle name, Morgan, instead of "F," which his initials on the ring suggested. Upon receiving the inquiry Laura Escalante, an alumni officer, started an extensive search of enrolled students from the institution's records dating back to the mid-1960s. Escalante successfully cross-referenced the clues from the ring until finally landing on Frederick Morgan Perigo, a mathematics major.
Once a direct contact was established by the University, following Perigo’s verification on exact circumstances of his loss, Escalante connected him to Davis. Davis organised an international FedEx delivery from Barbados to have the long-lost keepsake returned to its owner. The package arrived in the hands of Perigo on the day before his birthday, completing a full circle of forty-seven-years. The unexpected timing of the arrival turned the retrieved memento into a celebratory birthday present for the Canadian resident, who was deeply moved by the collaborative efforts of his alma mater and the recovery diver.
