Woman found a Cal Poly class ring at a California lake. Who does it belong to?

A woman found a Cal Poly class ring at a lake in Gilroy, and now she’s hoping to reunite it with its owner.

The woman, 46-year-old Stasha Maroney, posted on the Gilroy CA Community page on Facebook on July 15 that she found the ring approximately 50 yards from the boat launch on July 11.

The ring appears to have the number 85 marked on one side and two 5’s on the other. There are initials engraved on the inside of the band, which appear to read “GDB.”

The ring has a blue-green stone surrounded by “California State Polytechnic College 1901,” which was Cal Poly’s official name from 1947 to 1972.

In an email, Maroney, who works in Gilroy and lives in Hollister, said she was paddle boarding with a friend when they decided to take a break on shore.

“I just happened to spot the ring about three feet from the water, laying in the wet sand and dirt,” Maroney said in the email. “I was shocked, as I had jokingly told my friend ‘I think I might find a treasure today,’ only about 15 minutes prior to finding the ring.”

It’s unclear whether Maroney found a ring that had been dropped recently or if it was lost years ago and just now turned up at the lake.

“I would love to return this to its owner,” Maroney said in the Facebook post, which has received 99 comments and been shared more than 1,000 times. “Any suggestions of other sites to post are welcome.”

Jennifer Fanning, senior director of alumni engagement at Cal Poly, said that she received an inquiry from the finder of the class ring but didn’t have any luck finding a match when she looked up the initials and grad year in the alumni database.

There were various theories in the comments on the online post about who the rightful owner might be. On Cal Poly’s 1955 scanned, online yearbook , a student named Gerald D. Branson is pictured. However, Fanning said that Cal Poly’s Alumni Engagement Department had no records of someone with the initials and grad year.

Maroney said she has spent “countless hours” researching and calling telephone numbers listed for Bransons. She has also used public records search tool FastPeopleSearch to try to locate the owner.

“I plan on holding the ring until the owner is located,” Maroney said. She added that any help in locating the owner of this ring is greatly appreciated.