A Nova Scotia woman may donate a medal she’s owned for decades to the U.S. Olympic Committee after recently learning it dates back to the dawn of the modern Olympics.

Vicki Fitzgerald, who grew up in rural Nova Scotia, has in her possession a medal sent to her family by an aunt in Massachusetts in 1956.

Fitzgerald, who was seven years old at the time, found the medal in an article of clothing.

“I started feeling in the pockets and where you would put a pocket watch or maybe a lighter, I found this medal,” she told CTV News.

No one in the family, including the aunt who had sent it, knew its origins, so Fitzgerald was allowed to keep it.

“We just called it a coin, we didn’t even call it a medal in those years,” Fitzgerald said.

The medal became her prized possession, but it was only decades later that she uncovered its unusual history.

A Halifax coin expert contacted by CTV News on behalf of Fitzgerald said he believes it is a participation medal, which were given to Olympians who competed in 1906 in Athens, but didn’t reach the podium.

“This one was one of the early ones from 1896 in bronze that was used again, 10 years later, and counter-stamped with this 1906 date,” Gerard Feehan told CTV News.

The surplus medals were left over from the 1896 games – the first modern Olympics held in Greece.

Like Feehan, the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) believes Fitzgerald’s coin is a participation medal, and thus an important piece of the history of the Olympic movement.

The 1906 Games fell between the 1904 games in St. Louis, and the 1908 Games in London, and for that reason, the International Olympic Committee does not recognize the event.

But USOC archivist Teresa Hedgpeth believes that “is an oversight that needs to be corrected” and says the medal would “be one step in that direction.”

“If Vicki donated the medal to us, it would become the Vicki Fitzgerald Collection in the USOC Archives,” she said.

The U.S. Olympic Committee does not have a similar medal in its archives.

Fitzgerald is now considering the offer to preserve it at the USOC in her family’s name, saying she had always planned to pass it down to her children or grandchildren.

“I’d be happy for it to be in a safe place and protected.”

With reports from CTV Atlantic Bureau Chief Todd Battis and CTV Atlantic’s Jayson Baxter