Family History – Michael Durbin

I am one of ten kids of Bill and Lorraine Durbin. My dad’s father died before I was born, but my mom’s dad, the remarkable James Kalish, was a regular presence in my life as a kid.

In the 1960s, he and his wife Bernice lived in East St. Louis, Illinois, and we lived in nearby Fairview Heights. They came to our house all the time, or we went to theirs, and there is one thing that struck me about Grandpa Kalish more than anything else: He was always happy, always impressed with whatever his grandkids were up to, and always so positive—about everything.

As a child, I knew nothing about the childhood of our Grandpa Kalish, nor his family history, nor what his life had been like before I met him. Only now, decades later, do I know enough about his early years to realize how incredible it is that he was so happy in his later years.

For the past few months I’ve been looking into my family history, posting here as I went. Now it’s all in a new section of this website.

I’ve been curious about this story for more than fifty years. In 1973, when I was ten, I asked my parents if we had a family tree. “No,” came the answer, “but let’s make one.” Sitting at our kitchen table in Fairview Heights, Illinois, Mom and Dad jotted down the name of every ancestor and relative they could think of. They tossed out names to each other, pausing occasionally, then suddenly blurting out a name that meant nothing to me. In his perfect cursive handwriting, Dad wrote down names that went back two or three generations, with lines connecting them, until they could think of no more. That tree went back about 80 years. Today we can go back more than three centuries.

Tag: Family History

The Resilient Jimmy Kalish

My Family History