Youth finds ring in a graveyard and uses it to travel back and forth between the past and present

Question

edit - Thank you, community. Someone had the right book, I really cannot that you all enough!

This has been bothering me for years and I never finished reading the book. When I was younger (around 1994-1996) I read a young adult book about a youth who finds a ring in graveyard. They put on the ring and spin it causing them to go back in time (if I remember correctly the youth only goes back to the 1880s). When staying in the graveyard they are a solid person, when they leave the graveyard they become like a ghost. This person falls in love with another youth they meet in the past. They travel back and forth often between the present and the past.

Answer 1

This sounds very similar to the plot of Your time, my time, a book by Ann Walsh, first published in 1984.

Set in a remote Canadian community in British Columbia, it tells the story of Elizabeth Connell who finds a magic ring in a cemetery that allows her to travel in time.

From a review on Goodreads:

After much exploring of the township and its surroundings, she discovers the old cemetery and soon finds a peaceful spot that becomes her place to read and write and daydream and doze. It is in the graveyard that she one day uncovers a small gold ring, a ring with some rather inexplicable powers.

Twisting the ring on her finger, she is transported back to the 19th century, to Barkerville’s gold rush heyday. And it is there – in the rather new cemetery of 1870 – that she meets a freckled boy with a crooked nose, a curious nature and a loving heart, who swiftly captures her own heart.

The boy is named Steve, and they fall in love. She indeed finds that she cannot travel outside the graveyard when she is in the past:

she and Steve learn that she cannot travel outside of the cemetery into Barkerville of 1870, and she can take no one with her on these travels. There are boundaries to this time travel.