I’ve been curious about my ancestry for as long as I can remember. Who begat whom? What were their lives like? What was going on in the world during the times my ancestors lived? My dad and his brother Bob were equally curious, especially after retirement when they spent countless hours researching our past.
I inherited my dad’s family history materials when he died in 2001. When Uncle Bob died a few years later, I inherited his too. My collection of genealogical material—books, booklets, loose papers, photos, and so on—now fills nine crates in our attic. And that’s not counting all the digital files in Dropbox folders. In the spring of 2025, I decided to crack it all open, to remind myself of who begat whom and what their lives were like, and to summarize what I found.
The history of this Durbin family is, of course, still being written. The ten of us Durbin kids live across six different states nowadays, and dozens of kids and grandkids are even more widely dispersed. Each of our families is a story in progress, and I’ll leave those for future family historians to tell. What I have aimed to tell in this project, as best I can, is the story of Bill and Lorraine Durbin and the family they raised, and what I know of the Durbin, Gaul, Kalish, Krokvica, Kutkin, Logsdon, Malec, and Walko families who came before theirs.
I encourage anyone with stories and photos of their own from this family history to get in touch. Just leave a comment on any page. Or, I can be reached at michaeldurbin919@gmail.com and would love to hear from you.
Thank you
The words here would have been impossible to write were it not for the work of others, starting with my dad, Bill Durbin, and his brother, Bob Durbin. They spent years collecting and documenting precious family history, as did Robert Ross Durbin, a fourth cousin twice removed.
My mother, Lorraine Durbin, and her sister, Jackie Mahoney, have never tired of answering my endless questions about Mom’s side of the family. Last but not least, my cousin Ann Mahoney’s rich compilations of the Kalish, Krokvica, and Malec family histories were as priceless to me as they will be for generations to come.
I am deeply grateful to all of these genealogical collaborators, and to those who took the time to speak or correspond with me directly. Each is listed in the section that follows.
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Michael Durbin 