Bead expert dies in Ghana

LAKE PLACID (USA) -— World-renowned bead scholar and Lake Placid resident Peter Francis Jr. died Dec. 8 while traveling in Ghana. He was 57.

It is not yet known how Francis died. According to his parents, in whose basement Francis lived and worked when he was not in the field, a friend and traveling guide called them Dec. 7 to say that Francis was going to the hospital.

The following day, the friend called again to say Francis had died.

"We have not heard anything yet from the embassy in Ghana or the State Department in Washington," his mother, Phylis, said Wednesday. "We have to wait."

A former seminary student, rock-and-roll record collector, artist and teacher, Francis spent the last several decades of his life traversing the world to study beads. He founded the Center for Bead Research and designed and maintained www.thebeadsite.com, a bottomless source of information about beads.

Once dubbed by the New York Times as the "world’s leading authority on beads," Francis had said his study of beads was an excuse to learn about people and civilizations around the world.

"Once I stumbled onto beads, I realized this was it because they’re made out of everything, and everybody has them. I had no idea beads could tell so much," he said in a recent interview with the Press-Republican.

"Beads show up at the same time people are starting to catch fast animals, about 41,000 years ago. They must have made beads to show they were better than other people. It was a social mark. It still is a social mark."

News of Francis’s death struck the bead-enthusiast community hard. On the Web site for Hand Thoughts, an organization dedicated to promoting bead art, Francis is described as a "generous, diligent scholar and gentleman of peace."

"His death is a gigantic loss to the bead research world which he helped more than anyone else to create," wrote one mourner on a tribute page dedicated to Francis, "but also to the huge numbers of personal friends he had accumulated all around the world, each of whom felt his warmth and his open informal manner."

At the time of his death, Francis was involved in archeological digs in Georgia and Egypt and was working on several books.

"I’ve been around the world 14 times, almost all of it in pursuit of beads," Francis had said. "The whole world’s been connected, and you can follow it in beads."

The Francis family is awaiting an autopsy to determine the cause of death. Funeral arrangements are pending.