I have about six generations of photographs.

Everyone had cameras through the years.
Even in New York where they all came from.

Some long gone relative in San Francisco had a photo (now mine) of the 1898 family row house sitting in sand dunes, no other houses to be seen. Two sisters, widows, had 7 children between them. My grandmother, Esther, and her siblings, Elizabeth, twins Newell, Alpheus, and baby Henry used to toss unwanted dinner out the window. My great grandmother, Daisy, didn’t notice the food scraps covered by the vast windblown sand. I have a gold-framed photo of the child Esther with her older sister. My great grandmother, Daisy, went to the symphony. When she got home she played all she'd heard by ear.

The family moved near the Presidio in the new century. Edward, an older neighbor would baby-sit. At the start of WWI Esther married Edward. She posed in a breezy modish dress and he so handsome in his Army uniform with tall boots. He left for France to fight at the front. For several weeks he only had Hershey Bars for sustenance. Home at the end of the war, he made bathtub gin during Prohibition. They had identical twins in 1919: my mom and Aunt Esther. Photos of the towheads leave us wondering, who is who? A neighbor boy kidnapped the toddlers as a prank and left them in someone's yard. The twins escaped and walked home. All was well. The adults laughed about it over drinks with the boy's parents..."Boys will be boys!"

One younger brother, Edward, pestered the twins, but the youngest brother died of pneumonia at 6 years old, breaking everyone's heart. The school age twins roller skated down the Presidio wall. They went to a girls’ high school and had to walk to school uphill both ways, and that is true in San Francisco.

One scrapbook shows the teenagers in their matching swimsuits, practicing for the Olympic tryouts. Gramps would not allow it, due to the trouble in Germany during 1932. The twins had to share a '38 Ford convertible. A framed print is on our bedroom wall.

Moving the family to Marin in the 1930's, my grandfather built a house on a hill. The living rooms were paneled in 12 foot high, 6 foot wide redwood, framing a huge window view of the mountain. He added the first cement swimming pool in the area. It sat on a steep hill. There was poison oak growing under it.

The twins married best friends and all of us siblings and cousins were born. We'd visit the grandparents to swim. The pool steps sat above an empty space, which was dark. The big brothers teased, "Alligators live there, JUMP QUICK before they get you!" Diving off the board at the deep end felt safer, the water was clear sky blue...only the steps were dark. There are photos of the olden days when the twins looked down from the tennis courts. In many family reunion portraits taken by the pool there are babies and children, who show up later in the same spot; older, taller.

My grandmother painted and played ragtime piano. If you mentioned animals, she'd play "Hold that Tiger". Mention your crush and she'd play "The Object of My Affection has Turned My Complexion from White to Rosy Red". In between songs she's announce, "I now will play a tune called, "Many a Negative Girl was Developed in the Darkroom". As I grew up I realized that wasn't really a song. We'd watch her play or color in our new coloring books from Santa's Toys. She trusted us to use her sharp sewing scissors. My sister's favorite photo is of the two of us painting our grandmother’s face like a clown, because we wanted to and she said yes. Gramps sat in his leather chair, listened to opera and snored.

Our grandmother was a wonderful cook. Her salads were perfection...no iceberg lettuce cut into chunks with Thousand Island. Once my dad tested her new garbage disposal by grinding up a coke bottle (she always had coke!). He shouted over the racket, telling everyone that it sharpened the blades! Her kitchen was modern and bright.

The holidays were wild and crowded with extended family and amazing food. Ice cream came from molds kept cold in a box with dry ice. The boys threw the ice into the pool. The molded Santas had red hats sprayed on individually. Each was different. Lots of light, bright laughing faces, beautiful hands holding gin and tonics, paper hats on little kids' heads: photographs show us all dressed up and excited. Dad would get a little wound up. The drive home was quiet except for his barking. Our Christmas card that year featured the adults and the big teenaged boys in front of the fireplace. We little girls stood shyly in the front of the 4 of them.

Of my first child, my grandmother announced that she must be called Leontine, because she looked so much like her father's dad, Leon. One photo shows four generations; my grandmother, my mom, me and my oldest daughter. Another baby girl, another picture: four reddish hairdos in a row. My dad took the first photos of the babies. Weak, old and confused at the end of his life, he wobbled to his feet, growling, "Ann, help me out here!" He checked the light meter and shot the best baby pictures of all. My dad's gorgeous landscape photos were sketches for his paintings, several of which hang on my walls.

Those babies are grown. One, a photographer, documented her grandmother's last days in the nursing home. Given a photo album for Christmas, I cried; it gently represented pain, and the photographs were respectfully moving.

I wonder who all those people are in the piles of photographs: tintypes of stern, forgotten relatives, carefully captioned tiny black and while photos in scrapbooks, perhaps cousins from the turn of the century. More cousins come along in the new millennium. Strangers in uniforms, unknown ladies in lacy dresses, weird white hooded horseman, little children on the porch with the elderly nanny who had been freed from slavery as a babe, costumed gentlemen with young masked women, babies lit up by a single candle on a cake, Christmas trees, ornaments and lights. And the dogs, so many dogs, some duck hunters and some fishermen, some swimmers, cats, but lots of dogs.

I was completely overwhelmed by the sheer tonnage of stored photos: weddings, celebrations, graduations, swim meets, music recitals, vacations, birthdays, new babies, and big family reunions. My sideboard is filled with photo albums from generations ago until now. One Christmas recently, the adult children received big boxes of loose photos from the decades.

It got away from me. The new generation can figure out some way to save it all for posterity.