Tom Hughes
Sergeant Major
- Joined
- May 27, 2019
- Location
- Mississippi
One fact is for sure....Rings fall off fingers.
Especially when you march all the time and are malnurished. Weight is lost and it becomes harder to maintain jewelry on the fingers.
This is the logic I'm using when I've dug these gold plated brass wedding bands in civil war camps.
These are so interesting to me because they are personal artifacts and ones that probably were not intended to be discarded in the camp like other relics that we find.
You can still see the remaining gold plate on some of these specimens pictured.
Now here's an exception.
This woman's wedding band shows a high degree of decoration and has retained 95%+ of its original gold plating.
It fits my 18 year old daughter's hand perfectly, so I know where this ring will end up when I'm gone. lol
I can only imagine a soldier bringing his wife's ring with him to war as a keepsake of his love back home. You never know.
That's what I love about finding these relics from the war years. It allows us to guess and speculate and share these tangibles from some of the darkest days in our nation's history.