The governing purpose for A Family Portrait from beginning to end has been to delineate the kinds of people the writer's forebears were-their characters, their habits and values, successes and failures-and to trace in their lives the history that encompassed them. Their significance lies in their brilliant ordinariness. In them we come to see the continuity of human life which funnels the past through us to the future. The author writes about those generations before her, "no matter how different we are from each other, our experience is inevitably the same. We know happiness and grief, hope and despair, love and the kind of resentment and fear that grow into hate. We know disappointment and humiliation, exhilaration and the pride that comes from small triumphs. We are selfish and cowardly but all of us have moments of heroism when our own generosity and courage take us by surprise. Our families help us see these things. Imperfect as they were, they believed in us and loved us without reservation in our own imperfection. These gifts we keep and use and pass along to the next generation, hoping they are improved but knowing that our best-we hope we have done our best--shifts with each new perspective. This is what it means to be a part of the communion of saints, and these are the saints that sustain us."