CRESTVIEW — Like many people's most treasured belongings, it’s not the object's value but sentimental attachment that makes it dear.
In the case of Barbara Adams’ pendant, which she lost Tuesday, it’s also the history behind the piece. It was formed from rings once owned by the mother of one of Crestview’s most prominent early residents and mayors.
The late Purl Adams served many offices in Crestview’s earliest years, but his mother, Alma Elizabeth Moore Adams, never had the chance to watch her son’s rise to regional importance. She died of pneumonia when he was just 6 weeks old.
“Mr. Purl had kept all of his mother’s rings,” Barbara Adams said. “When Purl Junior and I were going to get married, Mr. Purl took all those rings — there were about five of them — and gave them to me. They just fit my fingers.”
RINGS TO PENDANT
Barbara Adams wore her late grandmother-in-law’s rings for many years, but over the decades, they grew brittle. Not wishing to have one break and get lost, she found a way to preserve the treasures.
“I said, ‘I know what I’ll do: I’ll have all these rings melted down and I’ll make a pendant out of it, and put one of the diamonds in the center of it,’” Adams said.
The rings' gold yielded about an inch wide — “not huge, just kind of medium sized” — round pendant, with a “beautiful diamond in the middle,” Adams said.
“People in the store or in church would say, ‘That’s the prettiest necklace,’” she said.
When she returned home from running Tuesday errands in town, she realized the pendant was no longer hanging from the necklace.
“I’ve hunted all through the house and all the places I went to Tuesday — the different little stores and the parking lots I stopped in,” Adams said.
“That was one of my most special pieces of jewelry,” she said. “I know things happen in life that we have to stand, but I hope somebody might find it somewhere.”
HOW TO HELP
Anyone who finds a pendant around the First United Methodist Church area on Texas Parkway and Eighth Avenue, in the downtown area near FAMU's College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Woodruff Avenue, or in Northwood Plaza shopping center's north section, can contact Barbara Adams at 682-0739.
Email News Bulletin Staff Writer Brian Hughes, follow him on Twitter or call 850-682-6524.
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: Missing jewelry has historic attachment to Crestview forefather