Lacey Man Finds Class Ring, Unearths A Piece Of A Family's Past

LACEY TOWNSHIP - No one knows how or when Christopher Joseph Moyer lost his 1962 Woodbridge High School class ring.

There's a high school photo of him in his forest-green graduation outfit, proudly displaying the ring on his right hand. But the ring disappeared sometime after that and was lost for decades. Sadly, Chris Moyer died in 1974.

But thanks to a dedicated Lacey couple and some detective work, Moyer's family will have a little piece of him back, when they travel to Lacey this weekend to pick up the ring.

Dominick Tremarterra - whose hobby is metal detecting - was poking around a drained Lacey lake recently when he got a hit. Whatever it was, it wasn't sparkling in the early winter sunlight. It was buried 18 inches deep in the muck.

He cleaned it off and saw it was a 1962 Woodbridge High School class ring. He and his wife Jennifer made it their mission to find the owner. Jennifer knew a woman who worked for the Woodbridge school district. She gave Jennifer two names that matched the initials that could possibly be the ring's owner.

One of the women, Amy Matisa Moyer, asked her mother to check her jewelry box to see if her father's class ring was there. It was not. Amy checked with family members and came up with her father's 1962 graduation picture. He was wearing the ring Dominick had found in the lake.

"So when Amy sent the picture of her father with the ring on, I literally gasped," Jennifer said. And so did Dominick.

Jennifer did speak with the other man with the same initials. The man said he never had a high school ring, but remembered Christopher from high school.

It's not the first ring that Dominick has found, his wife says.

"That's his love and passion," she said. "He actually help find a 20-year-old lost wedding band a couple years ago and as soon as he found this ring he wanted to find the rightful owner!"

Photos: Courtesy of Jennifer Kinzley-Tremarterra and Dominick Tremarterra