You've heard about sending out an S.O.S. with a message in a bottle, but how about an urn with someone's ashes inside washing up on your front lawn?

The urn washed up after days of rough surf caused by the remnants of Hurricane Ian and was found in the beach grass outside of Ryan Leonard's bayfront home in Ocean City by Leonard his two sons, Jackson, 7, and Reid, 3, on Friday.

He posted on the Ocean City Facebook page asking if anyone knew the woman whose name was on the urn.

The purple memorial urn is engraved, "In Loving Memory Mom, Paulette Eva Rose 7-22-1949 to 6-24-2021."

Leonard told the Cherry Hill Courier-Post that many things have washed up at their property over the years, but never anything like this.

A quick online search found the woman's obituary, but that didn't clear up the confusion about how the urn had ended up in Ocean City, NJ.

The obituary said that Paulette Eva Rose Tricoche died at age 71 in Macon, Georgia, hundreds of miles away.

On Saturday, a representative with the funeral home in Georgia said his records showed that Tricoche was originally from Cape May Court House. That made the mystery of the washed-up urn too much of a coincidence.

It turns out the woman's remains had been shipped to a family member still living in Cape May Court House last summer, according to the Cherry Hill Courier-Post.

The best guess is that someone in the family tried to bury mom's ashes at sea, and, in the storm, the urn washed up in Ocean City.

Sunday on his Facebook page, Ryan Leonard gave us the final piece of the story concerning Paulette's urn adventure.

The crematory has put him in touch with the woman's daughter and he plans to return the urn to her (hopefully) for good.

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