This is far more than another display of old photographs showing San Francisco in flames or in ruins -- although those images are fascinating, enlarged so the smallest detail can be studied, or projected in a narrated slide show.

"Aftershock!" is about the people who survived. There's a vivid picture of the grandeur they left behind, the horror as they escaped the ruins, tent cities they called home for months, the relief effort centered in Oakland, and the rebuilding of San Francisco.

There are large-scale, can't-miss exhibits: an original 12-by-14-foot refugee tent; a "shake table" where visitors can experience a simulated earthquake in the setting of a re-created Victorian room.

There are even more artifacts that offer a rewarding, intimate glimpse into life a century ago. Among them are a stack of ceramic spoons from San Francisco's Chinatown, fused together in the inferno, unused streetcar transfers from April 18, 1906, the day of the earthquake, and San Francisco mayor Eugene Schmitz's "shoot to kill" order to combat looting.

Curator Aimee Klask told a preview audience that the exhibit was conceived to explore the untold stories of the disaster survivors.

Those stories are featured in photographs, diaries and collections of personal artifacts, from postcards to a Japanese teapot. Among the historic figures are Lew Hing, who turned his Oakland cannery into a center for Chinese refugees, and African-American barber Henry Johnson, who fled to Oakland with his wife, Amy, but returned to San Francisco to continue cutting hair. Their descendants took part in events marking the opening of the exhibit this week.

The notes, newspaper stories and recollections from the period are sometimes melodramatic, sometimes matter-of-fact, sometimes heartbreaking.

"I was only 3 years and 9 months old, but I can remember everything," recalled Flora Meyer Allen, who lived past 100. "Mostly, I remember the color of the sky. It was so red. My older brother lifted me up to the window and said, 'See, that is why the sky is so red. San Francisco is on fire.'"

In the East Bay later that day, a woman named Esther Noffsinger wrote hurriedly on the blank pages of a book: "San Francisco is in flames and all communications by wire is cut off but crowds of S.F. people throng the streets of Oakland penniless with only clothes on their backs."

Eventually Oakland, a city of 67,000 at the time, would deal with more than 200,000 refugees.

A companion exhibit in the museum's history department, "Oakland to the Rescue!" depicts the relief effort -- and the wary reaction of some people who feared the influx. In a newspaper story running just days after the earthquake and fire, the Oakland Real Estate Association "emphatically protests" any expansion of Chinatown as "a menace to the property of our city."

The exhibit begins by depicting San Francisco before the earthquake, with a motion picture showing a ride down Market Street. But it also points to the quake's effect elsewhere in Northern California.

There are snapshots from Oakland, where six people died, and horrifying photographs from what was then called Agnews Insane Asylum, where more than 100 people were killed when buildings collapsed.

Also displayed is the official reading of the earthquake recorded at Chabot Observatory in Oakland -- not a long, jagged line, but a tangled mass that looks like a ball of twine exploding.

The "rebirth" portion of the exhibit includes souvenirs from the forgotten Portola Festival, celebrating the Spanish explorer a mere three years after the disaster, and artifacts from the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition -- such as the silver-bladed shovel President Taft used for the groundbreaking.

"Aftershock!" edges toward the present day with photographs and artifacts from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. But there are many points in the exhibit where visitors can imagine themselves dealing with disaster -- such as living with their families in a tent in Golden Gate Park for six months.

One of the most poignant items has an open-ended story that still reverberates. It's a postcard printed and mailed in 1906 by the staff of the Sacramento Bee. We don't know who it was sent to, or whether it was received, but here is the text:

"From inquiring friends we have received your name as among the missing since the disaster of April 18. If this postal reaches you, will you be good enough to reply on the attached card and mail it, in order that we may relieve the anxiety of those from whom the inquiry comes. No stamp is required."