Denise Aiken handed Marie McShane a small, precious piece of McShane’s family history in a small gray ring box when the two women met last month in the café at Barnes & Noble in Warwick.

McShane, a former teacher who lives in Coventry, brought a picture of her grandmother and some family genealogy with her. Genealogy is an obsession. She loves to fill in the small gaps among the people and places she comes from. And Aiken helped her do that.

“I have another piece with me,” said McShane of the unexpected gift from her past.

McShane and her family had always thought that the wedding ring on her grandmother Alice Elizabeth McElroy’s finger — the one placed there by her husband, Philip Joseph McElroy, in St. Patrick’s Church in Providence a century ago — had gone with her to her grave in St. Ann’s Cemetery. But it hadn’t.

Aiken found it a few months after Alice McElroy’s funeral in July of 1962.

“I don’t know why I looked down beside the curbstone, but I still remember seeing that glint of gold,” said Aiken, a former state representative and a lawyer with Rhode Island Legal Services. “It was a ring, a wedding ring. And after we examined it, I popped it into the pocket of my dress and went off to school.”

She was 9 years old, walking to what was then the Nelson Street School in Providence with her sister Elise.

The ring would stay with her for decades. How it got back to the family of its owner is part detective story and part simple human kindness. It is safe to say that not many people would have made the effort Aiken made to get the ring back to its proper place.

“I had to,” she said. “This is a love story.”

After Aiken brought the ring home, her mother placed an ad in the “Lost and Found” section of The Journal. People called about other lost rings but not the wedding ring. So Aiken was allowed to wear it on a chain around her neck. Later, at Mount Pleasant High School, she wore it on her right hand.

“I wore the ring for the unknown bride in part because her wedding day, Sept. 25, was one day before my birthday.”

Then came college and law school and marriage and a day in the early ’90s when Aiken was in Providence Probate Court. She went downstairs to the Department of Vital Statistics to see if she could find names to go with the date and initials on the inside of the ring — P.J. McE to A.E.Ke Sept. 25, 1906. And she found Philip and Alice McElroy.

She made some calls. She hit some dead ends. She felt an obligation, and the obligation remained even as she moved along with other things.

By this summer, she was getting desperate. The McElroys’ 100th wedding anniversary was drawing close. Aiken started calling every McElroy in the phone book. She found a McElroy who wasn’t related but knew of a woman in California who was and who had genealogy notes for the McElroys of Rhode Island. And those notes showed that Alice’s daughter Mary had a daughter named Marie McShane who lived in Coventry. Aiken called and told McShane that the ring she thought was in St. Ann’s Cemetery was about to be hers.

“I called my brothers and cousins and told all of them this wonderful news,” said McShane.

She now wears the ring on a gold chain along with a diamond that was her grandmother’s and an amethyst that was her mother’s.

McShane said she is very impressed, and very grateful, that the person who found the ring 44 years ago was finally able to bring it back home.