COVINGTON (WSLS 10) - It started out as a sort of treasure hunt for two teenage boys this summer, but it turned into a discovery they could have never imagined.
These modern day Indiana Jones dug up one family's history and brought some answers after a family heirloom appeared lost forever.
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Nathan Griffin and his cousin, visiting from Kansas, decided to pick up a metal detector and scan the yard. The two said they hoped to find gold.
"We were about to give up and I said 'you know, let's just check one more spot and see if we see anything,'" Griffin explained.
That one more spot was the one that resulted i n the find of a lifetime. So they started digging.
"All I first saw was gold. That's all I saw was gold and I started flipping out," Griffin said.
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Gold was just what what they were hoping for, but Nathan quickly realized it wasn't just any piece of jewelry. It was a Covington High School class ring from 1948.
And that became his first clue toward finding the owner. After that, the initials engraved on the side led him to the public library, but it didn't have a year book dating back that far. So they went to the local newspaper for help.
And that's where things really began to come together for the two boys -- and the family who thought the ring was missing forever.
Kathy Bowers said her son got a message from a friend who works at the Virginian Review.
"My son said would this be gammy's ring and I said 'yes, yes yes it is,'" Bowers remembered.
The class ring belonged to Kathy's late mother, but it was her younger sister who lost it in this backyard in the 70s.
"It took her a good while before she told mamma and of course she said to me she told me on the telephone she said, 'you know, when I had to tell my mother that I lost her ring... she never said anything to me,' but she said, 'I could see the hurt in her eyes,"" Bowers remembered of that conversation with her sister about her mom's reaction.
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Kathy called her sister who now lives in Knoxville and told her what Nathan dug up.
"I can't even describe the feelings to know that it's been found and how much it meant to my mother and how much it meant to my sister," Bowers said.
And Nathan said, even though the gold he found didn't bring him riches, it made him rich beyond his wildest dreams.
"It makes me feel good. It makes me feel that I found a piece of history that belonged to somebody else," Nathan explained.