The mystery of a lost wallet belonging to a Red Deer man has been solved and it has been returned to the rightful owner.
Pete Priestman, 55, from Williams Lake, B.C., was camping in the back country east of Cotton Wood House on the Barkerville Hwy in the North Caribou, B.C., region last week, when he stumbled across a wallet belonging to Neil Hamilton, 33, of Red Deer.
Priestman felt a certain kinship with Hamilton as the two men just so happened to share the same birthday.
“I have only met one other person in my whole life that had the same birthday as me,” Priestman said.
Priestman tried to contact Hamilton through his identification, but to no avail.
But as a last resort, before turning it over to the police, Priestman sifted through the wallet once more. It contained credit cards, a Social Insurance Card, current driver’s licence and an old licence from Ontario. The Ontario licence struck out and triggered an idea that Priestman hadn’t tried.
“After I spoke to the paper and looked through the wallet, I came across an Ontario driver’s licence of when he (Hamilton) was a teenager and got to thinking. Maybe that was his hometown and through directory assistance I got the phone number of his mother.
“I contacted her and she consequently phoned him and so in a very roundabout way we found each other,” Priestman said.
Hamilton, who had just finished a tree planting contract near Chetwynd, B.C., a community north of Prince George, just so happened to be travelling through Williams Lake. The two men arranged a time to meet at Tim Hortons on Wednesday.
“It is a good ending to the whole thing,” Priestman said. “He was quite thrilled, it was the wallet he had since he was a teenager. It’s not much usable anymore but at least he got it back and he was overjoyed, just bubbling.”
The two men had a quick conversation about their birthdays and a couple of laughs before Hamilton hit the road for more tree planting work.
It turns out Hamilton lost his wallet in May. He went back to look for it and spent almost a day on the trails before giving up the search.
Priestman was adamant about the returning the wallet to the rightful owner as there was everything in it to assume an identity.
Hamilton was unavailable for comment.
jjones@www.reddeeradvocate.com