Welcome!

Welcome to Talking Kin, a blog intended to share genealogical breadcrumbs.

I'm dedicating this blog to my grandmother, Thelma Irene Brown.  She taught me how to talk kin from as far back as I remember. She believed everyone is related and treated everyone she met like family.  Most of her conversations with anyone included kin talk.

I've been gathering tidbits of information all my life. Since so many resources and tools have come online during the last several decades, I've accumulated infinitely more information than I could ever sift through. My grandmother would have loved to explore all the branches and twigs, and I often feel like she is doing so through me. I hope to share some of what I've gathered and update it periodically. I also hope to talk kin in the comments for the posts others may find interesting.  

My grandmother liked to visit the cemeteries around Memorial Day, which she always called Decoration Day. She liked to gather with extended family members, no matter how far flung, to reminisce, share stories, confirm what they knew, and speculate on what they didn't. So, it's fitting for her that this blog would begin following Memorial Day this year. 

I am intending my posts to be about surnames in my direct lineage, mostly just to narrow the scope. So far, I have listed 262 from Adams to Zug, plus variations in many cases. And that's not counting all my cousins, inlaws, outlaws, and friends who probably might be kin. Going back far enough, we can discover together our mutual ancestry. My thought is that as I add new information to a post about each surname, I will also update the publishing date for that post to keep everything together as much as possible. That probably will include this Welcome post as things change. I've always thought it would be fun to gather all my information into a book, but as the sands appear to have mostly descended to the lower globe of my hourglass, it seems more feasible to dabble in this blog. For the same reason, my focus will be on those in my direct lineage, although my mind is evermore wont to wander, so I expect there will be points of digression.

Cover Image by Agata Pieńkowska. "Family Tree," 2021. Pixabay. User: dandelion_tea. Web. 30 May 2023.

This page was most recently updated: 15 June 2023.