More than 60 years after Mary Ruth Justice’s wallet disappeared, her family returned to Georgia College & State University to claim it. Her niece, Marjorie Williams, and nephew, Sterling Justice, went to campus Thursday to get the alligator-skin wallet of their aunt, who died two decades ago.
Construction crews renovating the university’s theater found the wallet a few weeks ago on the ledge of a wall in the basement. It contained five black-and-white photographs, a Social Security card and a Georgia state employment card bearing the woman’s name. Campus officials tracked down her family and told them about the wallet, which disappeared in the 1940s.
Justice was born in 1920 in Sparta, but eventually moved to Buffalo, N.Y., where she died in 1978.
