Edmund Fitzgerald

"Edmund Fitzgerald" is a search trending online today as a group of storms throughout the Midwest are threatening Chicago and Detroit with an attack that could be stronger than the gale that sunk the ill-fated boat in 1975.

In 2007, a Michigan man searching for rocks on the shore of Lake Superior found a life ring from the SS Edmund Fitzgerald near Copper Harbor, Mich.

The item is one of the few pieces ever salvaged from the vessel, which sank Nov. 10, 1975, The Marquette (Mich.) Mining Journal reported.

Twenty-nine men died in the tragedy.

Joe Rasche said he and his family were searching for agate stones when he saw the ring near a fallen tree. Rasche said the ring was 100 feet from the water's edge, up a rocky slope and three feet into the trees.

"I went up over the bank to look at the blown over tree and there it was," he told the newspaper. "I bet it’s been laying there for 30 years at least."

Rasche offered the artifact to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Paradise, Mich.

"In honor of all the people who lost their lives, I think it belongs in the museum," he said.

The sinking is the best known maritime disaster on the Great Lakes, mostly because of a ballad, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," written in 1976 by Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot. For more than three decades, a service at the Mariner Church in Detroit honored the 29 men who went down. In 2006 the Canadian government declared the actual wreck, 500 feet down in Lake Superior, off limits to divers.