This item may have been purchased in another country but I am not sure and there is nobody in my family to ask that would know since they are all deceased. My mother always told me it was a watch fob...The entire thing is silver in color with very detailed swag chains. Upon looking at the glass or crystal looking prism, it appears that there is a blue dot on the point in the center and a red ring inside. When turned over, the opposite is true (the dot on the center point is red and the ring is blue.) The only kind of markings that I was able to see is on a ring near the end and it says "PUR PRIMA GARANTIE"
To my surprise, I saw this item on the television show "Storage Wars" several months back and it looks exactly the same but the one on the episode was a necklace...otherwise everything else was identical. Unfortunately there was no information given that tells me anything about this item, what exactly it is, how old it is, where it is from, etc. and I have been searching the internet for information on it for the past 15 years or so! Can anyone please help???
Re: Watch Fob/Chain
We have the same piece! It belonged to my husband's father (deceased). We have no idea of age or value of the decorative watch chain. Would love to find out! thank you
Re: Watch Fob/Chain
I have one of these also. I bought mine in a vintage clothing store just outside the campus of LSU in Baton Rouge. It was being sold as a necklace, but it had a small chain hooked between the big ring and the hook to extend it in length so as to fit around a neck. It wasn't until a few years ago when I was looking at antique watch chains on Ebay that I realized that was what it actually was. I had always wondered why it had an outsized jumpring on one side (oooh.....to go through a buttonhole or belt loop...!) and a matching piece of chain dangling down on one side only. (Ah ha! It's a fob! And here I'd always thought that there'd just been a matching piece on the other side of the necklace that had gotten lost.)
The vintage store I think had it dated as the 1920's or so, but a local jewelry designer where I now live thought it was older than that, possibly Civil War era. I suspect it may be in between the two from what I've seen online, around turn of the century probably, and after 1880 but before 1920, but I also have a feeling that the sellers on Ebay and such don't really have any idea about the age of what they are offering.
I do however think that this was originally French, which would be quite possible in Louisiana -- in the later 1800s there were still a lot of people who had family back in France and a piece of French manufacture wouldn't have been that unlikely to have ended up there. To support this is that, while you don't find many of this type of watch chain with the heavy mounts and multiple chains on the US or UK Ebay site, when you go to the French Ebay at Ebay.fr and search "ancienne chaine montre" you'll come up with some heavyweight watchchains similar to this.