JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Three Jacksonville library volunteers just solved a mystery. It started with jewelry found inside a donated book and ended with precious heirlooms returned to a family.
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“We were just flabbergasted like, ‘Oh my God, what do we do,’” Friends of the Jacksonville Public Library volunteer Ricki Shoraka said.
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The libraries don’t keep track of who donates what, so these ladies had to channel their inner Nancy Drew to find out who the items belonged to.
“It was just a challenge, cause you just wanted so bad for them to be reunited,” Friends of the Jacksonville Public Library volunteer Ricki Shoraka said.
While the book didn’t have all the pages inside, it held a story from the objects stored within.
This story begins in October when a man donated his mother’s books to a Jacksonville library after she was moved into an assisted living facility.
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While sorting through books at the in December, volunteer Sylvia Wren, found a book that piqued her curiosity.
“It felt pretty light,” Wren said. “And I thought, well, that’s interesting. So, when I looked at it, I opened it and had a safe in the middle of it.”
Inside the secret compartment, Wren found fine jewelry – earrings, bracelet, and lockets.
Wren said she had never seen anything like this before.
The Friends of the Jacksonville Public Library receives thousands of books every month, and it was at their University Park Branch Book Store where the ‘detectives’ found the mother’s prized possession.
“It was so much fun,” volunteer Karen Allen said. “We all stuck our brains together.”
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There was no name or form of identification written on the book, but Allen found a revealing clue.
“Cause I’m nosy,” Allen said. “It was let me see that book and go flipping through this, and go well here is a paper, and it was some kind of invoice from Italy for the earrings that were in there.”
The invoice had an address and the words ‘gold earrings’ written in Italian…
That’s when the third volunteer, Ricki Shoraka, began her research.
“The name and address were in English, luckily,” Shoraka said. “That gave us the first clue. She was no longer living there, but online we happened to find a current address.”
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This led to the contact information for family, and the volunteers being able to reunite them with their precious heirlooms, and irreplaceable memories.
“One locket had a picture of the woman’s father and herself when she was very young,” Shoraka said. “And the other locket had a picture of her other son and his wife. And that son was deceased, he had been killed in a plane wreck in Miami.”
And unfortunately, the mom doesn’t remember much these days. So, finding these items really helped bring back some of those special memories - including the time, she bought the earrings in Italy with a group of friends.
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Action News Jas reached out to the son who donated the book, but he was not available to talk tonight.
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