The Lost Brooch

I didn’t set out to become a vintage jewelry person.

In fact, when I first started going through boxes of old jewelry, I didn’t know much about any of it. I knew what I liked. I knew when something looked old or interesting. But ask me the difference between Sarah Coventry and Coro, or whether a brooch was from the 1950s or the 1980s, and I probably would have stared at you blankly.

Then I found the hummingbird.

It was mixed in with everything else, a gold hummingbird with green stones covering its head and little diamonds across its belly.

At first, I treated it the same way I was treating most of the jewelry I found: pick it up, turn it over, look for a mark, and start trying to figure out what exactly I was holding.

Except this one had a mark. 18K. That got my attention.

Suddenly the little green stones looked a lot more suspiciously like emeralds. And those tiny clear stones across its stomach weren’t rhinestones.

They were diamonds.

There was something wonderfully absurd about it. Among all of the pretty costume jewelry, old pins, earrings, forgotten pieces and things I was still learning how to identify was this tiny hummingbird made of 18-karat gold, emeralds and diamonds.

And I almost could have missed it.

That was the moment something clicked for me.

Not because I thought every box of old jewelry was secretly hiding a fortune. Most of it isn’t. I’ve since spent plenty of time researching pieces worth $15 or $20, and I genuinely enjoy those too.

It was the discovery itself that hooked me. I started looking more closely.

A flower brooch wasn’t just a flower brooch anymore. Maybe there was a signature on the back. Maybe that signature led to a designer. Maybe the designer led to an old catalog page where I could finally learn the name of the piece and approximately when it was sold.

Suddenly I was learning about Sarah Coventry collections from the 1960s and ’70s. I was figuring out old jewelry marks. I was discovering pieces by Gerry’s, Monet, Florenza and JJ. I learned that some jewelry had names, wonderfully specific names like Whispering Leaf, Crystal Fern and Petal Lure.

Google Lens became a permanent fixture on my phone. And I started to understand why people love this stuff. There is something incredibly satisfying about taking an object that has become anonymous over the years and giving it back a little bit of its identity.

Someone once walked into a store, flipped through a catalog, received one as a gift, or carefully chose that brooch to wear on a coat or dress. It belonged to somebody. It went somewhere. It lived an entire little life before eventually ending up in a box for me to find decades later.

I’ll almost never know that whole story. But sometimes I can find a piece of it. And that is really what The Lost Brooch has become about.

Yes, I sell vintage things. Many of the pieces you’ll see here will eventually end up in my shop because there are far too many for me to keep and I love the idea of them actually being worn and enjoyed again rather than going back into another box.

But I also want this to be a place for the part I’ve discovered I enjoy just as much: finding out what these things are.

I want to look through old advertisements and catalogs. I want to decipher tiny marks stamped into the backs of brooches. I want to figure out whether something is from 1958 or 1978. I want to learn why certain designers became collectible while others disappeared. I want to find the strange pieces, the beautiful pieces, the surprisingly valuable pieces and the pieces that aren’t worth very much at all but are simply too good to ignore.

And I’m sure I’ll get things wrong sometimes.

I’m still learning.

Actually, I think that’s part of the fun.

The Lost Brooch isn’t an expert standing behind a glass counter telling you everything there is to know about antique jewelry. It’s me at the table with a loupe, my phone, a pile of old jewelry and entirely too many browser tabs open, trying to solve one tiny mystery at a time.

Sometimes the answer will be 18-karat gold, emeralds and diamonds.

Sometimes it’ll be a $12 piece of costume jewelry with a fabulous name.

I think both are worth finding.

So that’s where we’re starting.

With one little hummingbird I almost knew nothing about and all the lost treasures that came after it.