family treasures - the beginnings. 
What you see first when I show you this photo? My Grosi it has given me almost 20 years ago. For them it was an important memento.
front, the little girl is my Grosi. Remember the girl left in the picture from yesterday? Here she is depicted as an infant. Between the photos are about 13 years. This shot came from a time when nobody even the plight of World War I suspected.
called In turn my Grosi me then her sister and two brothers right behind her and of course there is also my great grandmother to see.
you in this house has brought up eight children. The oldest were ACTING already flown out as the last.
The boy is quite right to emigrate to the United States as a young adult, his widow many years later to return to Switzerland. The boy just left of the mother is seven years later killed in a tragic accident, horrible.
My youngest great-aunt told me, as now, with over 90 years, everything will be alive in the memory. For many years the event was far been in the background. But now the age as it is often as if the accident was just yesterday. She tells me how she had two sisters sat on the edge of the pavement and cried and cried. The way she describes it, I can see two out there, just a few meters away from the door.
Who are the two bigger girls on the left? Their faces do not match the others. They are neighborhood children. One can see that they are the only ones who have shoes. My grandmothers, great-uncle and great-aunt had only Sunday shoes.
Look great poverty in the picture? I do not.
I see a vibrant, self-conscious family. She lives in a terraced house, what was then still almost no one. I see a mother that grip and vigorously lead a family,
creates with their hands, all that needs this family. On the sunny side of the house has a large garden, which hergibt all the vegetables and berries, which need these children and their parents. I know of his father, who has
as artisans a permanent job, homecoming a more modest but steady income brings.
morning I will tell you what self-confidence and energy with which these people took their lives at the hand.
I look back on a long century, a long time during
knew a perennial family, what they can achieve with perspectives, classification, care bear compared to their own lives, to the acquired goods and loyalty to the craft.
The picture was taken 1911 or 1912th Oskar Barnack
just tinkering around at the small picture camera. There are years passed until the Leica was available and
street photography to an art form was . From the technical point of camera it was necessary that the people hinstellten quiet.
What have I seen first when I gave my Grosi this photo? Before me is an expensive photocopy made on a complicated color laser printer. The safe had cost five francs. I ask first, where the original was, but my Grosi is not certain. All the siblings have received such a copy. The picture is for them a reminder. Since an photocopy is enough at the latest.
for myself it is a historical document, to preserve the worth. What commission in case a photographer
specialized repro , whose work at least 200 francs cost? I have an adventure ahead of me would ask relatives to make their buffet drawers, cardboard boxes in closets and floor compartments.
will Sometime I get the original in hand.
In my family history, respects women, were well educated, full of it throughout life. Almost all boys and girls have learned skilled trades. 
