The Ohlone Native Americans lived here for untold thousands of years before Europeans ever set foot in California. San Jose first became a European style town in 1777 when the Spanish colony of Nueva California founded its first village at San Jose.

Spanish style weddings looked over by Catholic priests were the order of the day in early San Francisco weddings. It was not until the 1848 that California entered the United States by becoming a state. Wedding styles changed throughout these time, but up until the advent of photography there were very few visual recordings of these weddings since it was only possible to record them with paintings. Soon after photography came to California, there were couples having daguerreotypes made of them, typically a couple of days before their weddings.

During the mid to late 1800s, there were already diverse cultural enclaves in California with Native American, Spanish, other Western Europeans drawn from the Eastern United States and a large Chinese group.

Today, San Francisco is a very culturally diverse area where weddings from many traditions mix. There are many people with strong cultural ties to all of the Western Pacific rim nations as well as a large number from India. In weddings of couples whose parents immigrated here during he last few decades, we see weddings that reflect a mixture of their parents cultures and American cultures. Such weddings will often have the bride changing several times to reflect the cultural tradition that she and her groom are paying tribute to at that part of the wedding day.