Old US Navy ring

[evangilder]

Someone in my wife's family gave me this ring, thinking my veteran status would make me interested in it. While I am, I don't know the first thing about Navy rings. This one appears to be pretty old. I don't know what kind of metal it is, but it's pretty light. The stone is not mounted straight, but is in perfect condition. The 2 sides are identical in design.

I am trying to find out it's age. In a perfect world, I would be able to identify it's owner and return it to the owner, or next of kin. But I think that will be impossible as there are no distinguishing marks on it.

Anyone have any info on this?

 

[Micdrow]

Just dug mine out Eric, I would have to say its older then 1989 as the eagles on my are different. I will see if I can take some decent shots of it for you to compare but I am no shutter bug like you

 

[Micdrow]

Here is a picture of one from 1964. Picture from this link http://metaldetectingforum.com/showthread.php?t=103913

 

[evangilder]

Hmm, There seems to be a few variants. This one appears to be fairly cheaply made. It makes me wonder if it was one of the port of call places that banged out thousands of these things and sold them to service members. The Philippines used to be full of sellers that sold that kind of stuff. Turkey did as well.

 

[evangilder]

I have been digging on the net and found this one, which looks to be the same design:

It was up on Snyder's for $85.

 

[GrauGeist]

Is it possible that your ring was a "souvanir" ring purchased overseas, Eric?

I know that alot of locals used to produce things like rings, knives, clothing, etc or offer services like embroidering, photography and so on...

If this ring is such a case, it would be hard to nail it down to where and when, such as WWII Italy, Africa or Japan, or Korean war vintage...possibly even Vietnam?

 

[evangilder]

That's what I was thinking as well, Dave. The stone mounting is not straight and it may have been remounted at some point. My wife's grandfather was a flea market fanatic and he had all kinds of "stuff" that he had picked up over the years. Some of it was actually neat stuff, mots of it was junk. Just not knowing the provenance of something like this is kinda sad, like a lost medal.

 

[A4K]

Nice score anyway Eric, whatever it's origins.

I got one such flea market item myself from an uncle - a Zippo from Vietnam, with the engraved legend 'When I die, I know I am going to the Heaven, because I have done my time in the Hell'.
It is the 'the Heaven' and 'the hell' that makes me think it wasn't engraved by an English native speaker.

 

[evangilder]

There are a lot of things like that around flea markets and swap meets. I can remember as a teenager growing up in Milwaukee, the state fairground had "Rummage-o-rama" and there was so much stuff there it would take days to go through it all. There were a number of sellers that had second world war items, mostly old guys selling their war trophies and memorabilia. Looking back now, I missed one heck of an opportunity.

Having items without the provenance though makes them far less interesting.

 

[A4K]

Yep, there used to be alot of second world war treasures at army surplus shops, etc in the '80s and '90s, rarely had the money to get anything though!