By james art 
For more than a century, their engagement rings have been involved in countless Hampton Roads suggestions, while dozens of nerve ruins and young sailors proceeded to their storefronts to choose a diamond.
The family buys rubies, sapphires, opals, emeralds – every shade of gem – to sell bracelets, necklaces and brooches designed internally for more than 150 years.
After starting their trade in the UK under Queen Victoria, the family immigrated to Virginia after the Civil War and owns a series of names like Hardy’s Diamonds in Norfolk and later Hardy’s Jewellers in Virginia Beach.
Today, after five generations of jewelers, the family business has disappeared. His latest repetition, Hardy’s the Art of Jewelry, closed on 22nd street near the ocean on December 21st. It is not due to a lack of customers, the owner said.
It was time for something new.
Elizabeth Hardy has spent most of her life traveling around the country and Europe in search of the best stones and the latest design techniques in the world-but she said she rarely traveled as a tourist.
A few years ago, she and a team of researchers, editors and writer began working on an illustrated 60-page book “Through their time: an innovative 5th-generation jeweler trip,” documenting her family history.
At the time of his publication in September and with her career career out of jewelry, Elizabeth Hardy came to the conclusion: It’s all over.
“And I wanted to be able to choose,” she said, “When to go out under my own conditions.”
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According to her research, cataloged in Ahead of Their Time, family trade begins with her great-great-great-great-grandfather: Daniel Buchanan.
He worked as a London goldsmith when around 1849 received the tops of the orders: to design a watch for Queen Victoria, who wanted a watch as a gift for his son, Prince Edward.
And Buchanan triumphs.
The monarchy more than liked the clock. After the prince received his gift, a royal commandment described Buchanan as the official watchmaker of the Queen.
His success helped Buchanan open his first jewelry store in Glasgow, Scotland. In 1871 he sold the store to sail to America. With ambition to become a gentleman farmer, he establishes his family in the province of Virginia. But his leisure life didn’t work out.
After the economic depression began in 1873 and a fire destroyed one of its two mills, Buchanan returned to daily work.
He opened the first jewelry store in the United States in 1878. Local ads include illustrated crown images and business attracts enough customers to open second place in the state capital. Buchanan managed the Richmond store with one of his sons until his death in 1900.
His grandson Samuel D. Hardy opened a jewelry store in Norfolk in 1907. Three years later, a tall, free-standing clock weighing more than £ 600 was erected on the sidewalk in front of the showcase. The clock remains an icon of the center of the Grand Street, while Samuel’s son, George Hardy, did not close this store in 1978.
George – Elizabeth Hardy’s father – moves the family business to Virginia Beach.
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“The relationship between fathers and sons is very different from that between father and daughter,” Elizabeth Hardy said in an interview.
She adored her father and grew up in his store. While the other children went to the beach, she spent her spring vacations in floors and sorting diamonds. The gems were charming.
After high school, she visited the University of North Carolina in Chaple Hill and graduated in 1980 with a double degree in German and art before studying at the Geminology Institute of America as a graduate hemologist at a New York residence.
She was asked to join the Institute’s staff as a gemologist specializing in diamonds. She also had other suggestions for working in the big city. But her father and colleagues were the ones who convinced her to return to Hampton Rhodes.
“They said, ‘Betsy, you have to go home now and wait a few years. Give him three years. Otherwise you will always say “what if”. ”
She worked with her father until his death in 1999.
“There is no other business for exquisite jewelry in the United States, which is owned by the same family for five consecutive generations,” she said. “It works because we put honesty, honesty and quality in the first place. For example, we have never sold blender. They have always been exquisite jewelry. We have never made a compromise with this. ”
Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8138, [email protected]