



When Paul Marshall lost his ring six months ago that his then-girlfriend, Debra, had given him on his 40 th birthday, he assumed it was gone forever.

"I had written it off," said Marshall, 41, who lost the ring while on the job at GRK Fasteners, a Canada-based manufacturer of screws and fasteners. "I spent a few hours the next day going through hundreds of packages of screws, everything I had worked on the day before."

Marshall, who lives in Ontario, Canada, said the ring cost only a few hundred dollars but had sentimental value.

"Debra gave it to me on my 40 th birthday and it was the first time really I've gotten a ring from anybody," he told GoodMorningAmerica.com.

In a few days, Marshall plans to surprise Debra, his now-fianceé, by walking into their home with the ring firmly back on his finger, all thanks to a crew of construction workers who found his ring nearly 900 miles away in York, Maine.

The construction workers, Ian Renaud and Randy Newell, found Marshall's ring about two weeks ago in a box of screws purchased by their boss at Gendron Construction Services in York.

The men each thought the ring belonged to the other, they told Seacoast Online, which first reported the story. When they realized it did not, the men and their boss, George Gendron, set out to find its owner.

Gendron eventually got in touch, through the local lumber store where he bought the screws, with an independent manufacturer's representative who had the foresight to ask for the code numbers printed on the box of screws in which the ring was found.

The code numbers led to Marshall's place of employment, GRK Fasteners in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

"About a week-and-a-half ago our manager came into the machine room and asked the guys that normally work on the other machine if they lost a ring," Marshall said. "They said, 'No, but we know Paul did.'"

"I described the ring and it was it," he said. "The day I lost the ring I went to the other machine to help. I guess it fell into the machine and got packaged along with the screws."

Marshall said the ring was shipped last Friday and should arrive to him any day.

"In this day, when you turn on the news and the majority of news is bad, and then you hear that someone found it and is willing to go through all of this effort to find its owner, you go, 'There's a lot of good people in this world,'" Marshall said.

With the ring now on its way to Marshall in Ontario, he said he plans to surprise his fianceé with it because he's been "known to surprise her with things out of the blue." Marshall may not, however, be able to use his newly found ring as his wedding ring for their planned wedding in the summer of 2015.

"I've lost a fair amount of weight in the last little bit, which is probably why I lost it in the first place," Marshall said. "It's a titanium ring so I won't be able to size it so I don't know what I'll do with it."



