Some Materials Have Already Done Something

Most rings and jewelry are made from materials that were chosen for how they look.

A beautiful piece of wood, a striking stone, a clean band of metal, these things carry their own kind of appeal and meaning in the design. We've been making rings like that at My Roots since the beginning.

A few years into running this business, I started thinking about a different question. Not just what a material looks like, but what it has actually been through.

That question is what became the Military Heritage Collection.

What This Collection Is

Every ring in this collection is made from material sourced from real military hardware. Not inspired by or modeled after. Actual material from actual machines and weaponry that were part of American military history.

We work with collectors of vintage military hardware, people who have spent years acquiring, cataloguing, and preserving these pieces. The material comes through them. What we do is take it, cut it, shape it, and set it into a ring by hand.

The result is a ring that carries something most jewelry doesn't. A specific history. A weight that isn't just physical. Something collectible in its nature.

Here's what we're currently working with.

The Rifleman — M1 Garand Rifle Stock

If you're not familiar with the M1 Garand, here's the short version: it was the standard rifle carried by American soldiers in World War II and Korea. Every branch. Every major theater of the war.

General Patton called it the greatest battle implement ever devised. That sounds like the kind of thing people say about things, but in this case military historians tend to agree. While German and Japanese soldiers were using bolt-action rifles, American soldiers had a semi-automatic — meaning they could fire and chamber the next round without manually working the action between shots. In a firefight, that difference matters enormously.

John Garand, the engineer who designed it, gave the rifle to the U.S. government royalty-free. He never profited from the more than six million eventually produced. There's something about that worth knowing.

The walnut stock we use for The Rifleman is original. It was part of one of those rifles. We don't know which soldier carried it or where it went. That unknown is part of what makes it interesting to me. You're not wearing one story. You're wearing the possibility of any of them.

The Sherman — M4 Sherman Tank Steel

The Sherman tank was the backbone of Allied armor in World War II. It was the most widely used tank among the Western Allies — U.S. Army, Marine Corps, British, Canadian, and Free French forces all relied on it. North Africa. Sicily. The beaches of Normandy. The Ardennes in winter. Wherever the Allies were pushing, Shermans were part of it.

It wasn't the most powerful tank on the battlefield. By 1944 the German Panther and Tiger had it outgunned at range, and the crews who drove Shermans were aware of that. Nearly 49,000 were produced between 1942 and 1946. The Germans built about 1,300 Tigers. The Sherman won the war of attrition, not by being superior in any single quality, but by being reliable, repairable, and producible at a scale Germany couldn't match.

The Sherman ring is a tungsten band inlaid with steel shreddings from an actual M4. The steel is sourced through military hardware collectors. When I first held a piece of it I kept thinking about the five men who crew a tank the commander, gunner, loader, driver, and bow gunner, and what it meant to climb into one of these machines and go to work.

The Captain and The Convoy — Naval Destroyer Steel

The destroyer was the workhouse of the U.S. Navy. Fast, maneuverable, and built for sustained operations — destroyers escorted convoys across the Atlantic, hunted submarines, screened carrier groups, and supported amphibious landings across both theaters of World War II.

The steel we use for The Captain and The Convoy comes from decommissioned U.S. naval destroyers. It spent years as part of a warship doing the kind of work that doesn't always get the same attention as the headline battles — but that kept supply lines open, kept larger ships protected, and kept the whole operation moving.

If the Sherman tank won the land war of attrition, the destroyer won the same war at sea. They just did it with less fanfare.

Why We Made This Collection

I want to be straight about something. I didn't grow up with a deep personal connection to military history. I'm not a veteran. I came to these materials as someone genuinely curious about what they represent — not as someone trying to perform a reverence I don't actually feel.

What I do understand is materials. That's been the foundation of this whole business. The idea that what something is made from carries meaning that the finished object inherits. A ring made from Hawaiian Koa wood that grew for a century carries something from that tree. A ring made from the walnut stock of an M1 Garand carries something from every pair of hands that held that rifle.

The Military Heritage Collection exists because I believe that's worth preserving. Not in a museum, behind glass, where you look at it once and move on. But on your hand, every day, where you actually feel it.

These aren't replicas. They aren't tributes. They're made from the real thing — and I think that difference matters.

The Military Heritage Collection includes The Rifleman, The Sherman, The Captain, and The Convoy.

Each ring is handcrafted in Utah in limited quantities. The material is finite. When it's gone, we source more — but the history in each piece is specific to what we have.

Shop the Military Heritage Collection →