Sixty-five years ago, 22-year-old Army Air Forces Sgt. Paul Edward Rose tiffany was killed when his bomber crashed over western France.

Today, his identification bracelet, found by a French farmer 16 years ago, will be formally returned to his brother and nephew in Santa Fe.

Rose’s younger brother, Horace Boyce Rose, now 85, said he was in the Army in the South Pacific island of New Caledonia when he learned of his brother’s death in Europe in a letter from their mother.

“I never finished reading that letter,” he said. “I was completely overwhelmed by the knowledge that my brother was gone.”

When he first saw the ID bracelet last month, “I just felt like my brother was trying to reach out to me,” he said. “It’s so personal. He wore it on his wrist.”

The nephew of the deceased airman and his namesake, Paul E. Rose, is a professional musician, tiffany money clips photographer and computer technician who moved from Los Angeles to the Santa Fe area three years ago. His father, Horace, who had been living in Florida, joined him earlier this year.

The younger Rose, 59, said he grew up hearing stories about how his uncle died. His B-26 collided with another during a close-formation flyover of the Bricy Air Base near Saint-Peravy la Colombe on Oct. 8, 1944, during a memorial service for other airmen killed a few months earlier when the base was captured from the Germans.

In 1993, Andre Noury found a piece of the identification bracelet on his farm near the town of Coinces in north central France. The chain was no longer attached to the small rectangle of silver — 1 1/2 inches long and a half-inch wide. One side was engraved with the name Paul E. Rose, his Army serial number and the word Sterling; the other side had a dark outline of an aviator’s wings.

Noury “is a true farmer,” Rose said. “He works with his hands. He’s a simple guy. He doesn’t speak a word of English. And he was concerned because when he found it, he was advised to go to the American embassy and he was afraid it would end up in a box and just be overlooked forever.”

So Noury kept the bracelet with him. A few years ago, he met a French researcher named Christian Dieppedalle who agreed to search for the owner. Dieppedalle followed numerous dead ends before he found a Web site run by the B-26 veterans organization. After finding that Airman Rose had enlisted in Dallas, the organization contacted tiffany pendants the Dallas Morning News, which ran a story about the search for the survivors of the bracelet’s owner.

“A lot of people came out of the woodwork after that July 25 story, including some distant relatives who I never even knew,” the younger Rose said. “And they started contributing clues and possible ideas of where we were.”

In August, Rose received a call from a member of the veterans group from Jena, La., who told him about the bracelet. Rose said his first impulse was to suspect a scam, but the man quickly convinced him this was legitimate.

Rose said that once he received the bracelet, he waited for a few days to show it to his father. “I wanted to make sure he was in the right mood,” he said. “This can be a real bittersweet note.”

The bracelet will be formally presented to the Roses at 12:30 p.m. today at the Santa Fe National Cemetery. The tiffany earrings Veterans of Foreign Wars will have an honor guard there to deliver a three-gun salute and play taps. The French embassy in Los Angeles has arranged for the bracelet to be presented by Natalie Bonnard, president of the Santa Fe Accueil — described as a French welcome organization.

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.