On Sept. 24 Amos Martin of Bristol received a call at work from a Cornwall man about a lost ring. After a five-minute conversation. Martin told the man that he would be by after work to help him out.
It is not unusual for Martin to get such calls; the guy had been referred by a colleague, Mike Baker, on TheRingfinders.com.
“That means you pay me what my service is worth to you and what you can afford for me to find your lost item,” Martin explains in his profile. It’s not based on how long the search takes, it’s based on whether or not I find it.”
He does ask for $35 in travel expenses outside the 5-towns area.
“I will do my absolute best to reunite you with your lost item,” he says.
When Martin got to Cornwall, he found that the man who had lost his ring had been trimming brush and then throwing it onto a pile and then into the woods. He had no luck searching those spots. He suggested that the man trim back brush from the lawn to improve the possibility of finding the ring, and he did. After that task was completed, Martin returned to Cornwall on Oct. 3, and after about 15 minutes of a small grid search of the brush he had cleared Martin found the ring!
“Although I have located several lost rings this was officially my first as a ‘Ring Finder,’” Martin wrote on the website.
A full-time truck driver and an officer with the Bristol Fire Department, Martin has used a metal detector as a hobby on and off over 20 years. He has really kicked up his passion for the hobby over the past three years.
Martin’s profile on TheRingFinders.com explains that he works on a reward basis. He searches for rings and other things in all sorts of places: beaches, fields, woods, yards, gardens, yards, parks, shallow water and snow. He will look on other people’s property — if the gets permission. He acknowledges that using a metal detector is not permitted in National Parks, cemeteries and some historical sites.
“I’ve saved a lot of history from being taken by the Earth permanently,” Martin says in his RingFinder profile. He says his top finds are “a 1789 George Washington Inaugural Button and a Royal Newfoundland Regiment Cross Plate from the War of 1812, which is now on display in their museum in Saint Johns, Newfoundland.”
