It doesn't matter who you are nor how careful you claim to be, everyone can lose things they value. Sometimes it will be to gravity as something falls through a drain and is swept away. Sometimes a thief will carry it away. No matter what the cause, you end up the poorer. Worse, of course, if the thing you lose was valuable in emotional terms. Now replacing the thing will not be satisfying. A recent survey of married women found about half the respondents had lost personal jewelry. If you take each item in physical terms, the individual losses were less than $5,000 per item, but the loss in emotional was incalculable. How do you put a monetary value on the distress when you lose the last item that belonged to your mother? Interestingly, just over 65% of the respondents discovered their insurance policy did not cover the loss and could not even replace the physical object with something similar. This emphasizes the need to ensure you have adequate insurance for your personal jewelry.
You need to start with home insurance coverage for both repair and replacement. A precious object that is merely damaged is just as distressing as one that disappears in mysterious circumstances. This leads to the difficult question of valuation. The paper value may not be the same as the emotional value but insurance companies only accept the value of the physical object. In the case of jewelry, this will be the value of any precious metal used in its manufacture plus an additional sum to cover artistic worth. If individual items are objectively valuable, make a separate list and submit it to your insurer with photographs. It may be necessary to pay for a formal appraisal if the cumulative value of all the items is high or individual items are more valuable. In such cases, the appraisal may need to be adjusted every year to reflect changes in the international prices of gold, silver, etc. with each new value written as a rider to your home insurance policy. Ultimately, it comes down to the amount of cover you're prepared to pay for to feel protected.