He’s found numerous buttons, coins, jewelry and other metal objects lost and hidden from sight for decades until he discovered them again.
EAST LANSING – Tom Shively, also known as Treasure Tom, wants to know if you’re missing some jewelry.
Using a metal detector, he has turned up a woman’s 1978 Mason High School class ring on a silver chain, a silver ID bracelet engraved with a first name and a silver locket with a diamond and “I love you” engraved on the outside and two photos on the inside.
He’s unearthed the items at parks in East Lansing and Meridian Township in the past two years.
He wants to return them to their owners.
In January, Shively, of East Lansing, retired from the Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget after a 34-year career in information technology.
Treasure hunting has been a longtime passion. He got his first metal detector in high school.
I first connected with him in 2016 when I wrote about a young Holt widow who lost her late husband’s wedding band while passing out Halloween candy. It was a precious item to her, and it took Shively’s persistence to find it. The ring had likely been stepped on and pushed into the ground by trick-or-treaters.
Last year, he also helped a friend find a family ring that fell into a creek with a rocky bottom. It was a 2 ½ hour search in the cold.
To date, he’s been involved in about a half-dozen search missions for irreplaceable items. He’s also found numerous buttons, coins, pieces of jewelry and other metal objects lost and hidden from sight for years or decades until he discovered them again.
“My goal, and what I live for, is to discover and preserve history one relic at a time,” he said.
Since he retired, his treasure hunting is a larger part of his life. He’s working on scuba certification so he can dive shipwrecks.
“I want to treasure hunt on both water and land,” he said.
His sort of treasure hunting turns up far more junk than treasures. He belongs to a Lansing group called the “Pull Tab Posse” so named because of all the can tabs their metal detectors find.
He and his Garrett AT Pro metal detector, which he nicknamed “Betsy,” spent several weeks beachcombing in Florida this year and connecting with other treasure hunters. He found two silver rings, lots of pull tabs, and the welcome company of like-minded people.
“I firmly believe I’ve been doing it so long that Betsy…is more like my third arm,” he said.
His biggest find to date, though, has been close to home. Last fall he unearthed a small, hammered copper cross estimated to be 300 to 500 years old. He found it, buried, on an old trail in East Lansing.
At first, Shively, a history buff, thought its shape made it a Knights Templar cross, an item that would have belonged to a wealthy Christian military order that offered protection to European travelers to Jerusalem during the Crusades. Legends connect the Knights to the Holy Grail.
Shively took the cross to Lori Verderame, known as “Dr. Lori,” an antiques appraiser for the History Channel, when she held a show in Michigan.
She placed it in the Spanish colonial era, from 1500 to 1700, after the era of the Knights Templar.
Even so, such an old cross found outside of old military forts, missions and major waterways is a rare find, Shively said. It’s curved as if it was attached to a box or a saddle.
French missionaries and explorers were active in Michigan in the 1600s, but it’s a mystery how a Spanish cross might have made it to Michigan. He’s still researching it and recently read about a new process to date copper items.
But back to more modern-era finds.
Shively contacted the manufacturer of the class ring he found but discovered the company had been sold and didn't have records from that era.
If the ring or other items are yours, you can let Shively know. But be prepared to answer questions about the jewelry. You'll have to identify the letters on the inside of the ring, the name engraved on the bracelet and the pictures in the locket. Contact him at treasuretom@yahoo.com or on Facebook.com/tom.shively.33.
He doesn’t want a reward, just the satisfaction of knowing he’s returned them to their rightful owners.