Ringing True

He thought his late parents' wedding bands were gone forever

- BY Jonathan Edwards

GARY GUADAGNO HAD lost hope of ever finding his parents' wedding rings. While selling his childhood home in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 2011, just before his mother's passing, Guadagno searched high and low for the rings. He didn't find them.

He figured his mother, who had Alzheimer's, had thrown them out. He was devastated, but didn't know what else to do besides move on.

"They're keepsakes and part of my family legacy," he says.

A decade passed and the rings never turned up. Then, last September, Guadagno got a Facebook message from Hannah Keuscher, who had bought his mother's house back in 2011. Her husband, Josh Martin, had discovered a jewelry box with two rings inside a kitchen light fixture.

Keuscher and Martin suspected they held sentimental value for someone, and they thought the rings should be returned.

Anthony and Rosemarie Guadagno exchanged the rings when they got married in 1947. They moved into their two-bedroom house in the early 1950s. They raised Gary, their only child, while Anthony worked as a mechanic and Rosemarie as a stayat-home parent.