When my husband's great aunt died, she left everything she owned to be auctioned and the proceeds to go to the SPCA.
We were invited by the auctioneer to claim family photographs, so we went along on the preview day and spent a long time drooling over the marquees full of collectibles and wishing we'd sucked up to her during her lifetime so that we had scored, instead of the SPCA.
We found her late husband's photographs - he was the blood relative - and some, fortunately for us, were in beautiful Victorian leather-and-gilt-edged albums. Then the auctioneer showed us the boxes of photos from her family.
"I haven't been able to locate any of her relatives," he said.
"Won't you take them? Or they'll probably just get dumped."
So I rescued them, and they've been sitting in a box in my study for 15 years. Now, finally I know what to do with those that show views of Cape Town.
Historypin (www.historypin. com) is a new website created by the We Are What We Do organisation (www.wearewhatwedo.org.uk).
As part of their campaign to get the different generations talking to each other they decided to "create a website where people everywhere could share their old photographs and the stories behind them.
"We wanted people to dig out, scan, upload and pin their photos and stories to a map of the world for everyone to see."
The idea is to pin an historic layer of photographs to the current view shown in Google Maps, so that you can compare the current and past pictures of the same place.
It's really easy to upload your photos, and although there are very few of Cape Town at the moment, give it a year or two - and enough publicity - and you'll be able to see historic pictures of the city, and if you're lucky, of life in your street the way it was 60 or 70 years ago.
If you haven't discovered Google Maps, you're in for a treat, especially if you like spying on people.
Click on "Maps" on the Google home page, or go to: www. maps.google.co.za, type in your address, and you'll get a view of your road, and of your home, as taken by the Google Street View Trike.
My house was photographed some time last summer, and I'm very sorry now that I didn't know they were coming or I'd have painted the gate and chucked out the junk on the front stoep before it was photographed for the whole world to see.