The Jewels of Our Mothers

I have joked that my jewellery obsession comes from the fact that I don’t really have family jewels to inherit, so I’ve made my own legacy.

But that’s not totally true. Pictured above is a gold and jade ring that my mummy gave me. It was the first fancy piece of jewellery that she ever bought herself. It’s marked Marvel, which was a Toronto-based company that operated not too far from where I live now ( a friend’s mother used to work there in the 1960s and the folks who ran Fidea jewellers on Yonge St. confirmed this when they were closing down as they still had lots of new old stock from them).

Pictured above are pictures of my mother’s mother, Winnifred Hudson Bisset and her brother Howard Hudson.These pictures are kept in a locket that belonged to my mother’s mother’s mother, Ida May Hudson Rominger.

Here’s the outside of the locket photographed with a brooch fashioned from a pair of Victorian earrings that belonged to my Grandfather Bisset’s stepmother, Jean. Only the ring belongs to me. The rest are my mother’s inheritance. But they are the family jewels.