Missing engagement ring turns up 50 years later in Alberta couple's carrot patch

When Robert Cockwill, 80, decided to propose to Janet, 75, in 1969, he went out and got a cash advance from the Canadian Wheat Board and used half of it to buy her an engagement ring.

The two got married in 1970 and over the past fifty years have moved homes, had three children and eight grandkids. Today, one of their children and two of their grandchildren still live close by and help Cockwill out with the family farm, in Arrowwood about 100 kilometres southeast of Calgary.

Christmas Day was a “full house,” Janet said with a chuckle over the phone.

But perhaps the best Christmas gift arrived a few weeks earlier when their grandson and his girlfriend “raided” the carrot patch in the couple’s garden yard for supper and pulled out a carrot with a particular gleam to it.

The gleam came from Janet’s long-lost engagement ring, which had gone missing only a few years after they had gotten married.

“She just realized it was missing,” Robert recalled.

The couple turned “everything upside down” trying to find the ring to no success.

“I thought maybe it had been on the edge of the sink and went into the septic tank,” he said.

Janet, he added, disagreed but didn’t have any answers to where the ring may have disappeared off to.

After a couple of years,  Robert bought her a new ring. “Everybody was still kind of half-looking but after a while, you forgot about it,” he said.

Cue to a fall day in 2025. By now, the couple had been living in a house they built in 1982.

For several years, they had kept a garden plot on the east side of the house but when that area got contaminated with some “bad” compost, they created a new garden spot on the west side of the house.

Their grandson Nolan and his partner Morgan had dug the carrots up.

“His girlfriend saw that there was something on the carrot and they washed it up,” he said.

The ring still looked “good,” he said, although it needed to be sent to Ontario to be cleaned and re-sized.

“But the diamonds didn’t fade,” Cockwill said. “So there was proof that I’d actually bought a real diamond.”

Robert didn’t find out until he got home later that day, but Janet found out “immediately.”

“She knew immediately when he brought it over and he was grinning,” he said with a chuckle. “It was amazing. I told her she should buy a lottery ticket.”

Janet still wears the new ring, he said, with the other stashed safely away.

Since then and since having their story published online, the couple have received calls from “all over the place”.

“It’s odd the way that story circulated around,” Robert said. “It’s a good luck story.”