One American Family

One American Family: The story of a nation, as seen from the branches, of one family tree. By Michael Durbin. Episode One: Witness to Democracy

It was more than fifty years ago--I was ten--when I asked my parents a question: Would they write on a piece of paper the names of every ancestor they could think of?
Mind you, I'm the seventh of ten children of Bill and Lorraine Durbin, so getting solo time with both parents at once did not happen every day.
But they both said, okay!
Sitting at our Formica kitchen table in Fairview Heights, Illinois in 1972, they called out names as Dad put them to paper in his beautiful cursive handwriting--each word was like a little work of art.
When they could think of no more, Dad connected all the names with lines for their curious seventh child.
That first family tree had ten or so names on it and went back maybe 90 years.
Today, thanks to the work of many, my family tree has hundreds of names and stretches back more than 350 years.
I've been curious about my ancestry for most of my life. Who were my grandparents? Who were their grandparents? And so on.
But only recently did something occur to me:
This one extended family, starting with the Durbins and Logsdons in Colonial Maryland, and continuing for nine generations more, has lived through every era of US history there ever was.
We have witnessed everything. What has this family seen? That’s what this podcast is all about.
In each episode I'll tell a story from one branch of my family tree, along with what was going on in the United States at that time.
In this first episode I'll summarize what I know of my entire ancestry--more than three centuries of it.
Later episodes will go into much more detail.
To make this easier for you and for me, I've organized this overview into four chapters, each covering a distinct era of family history.
Let's begin.

Chapter One: Colonial Maryland. 1674 to 1790. A nation forms as a family begins.

In 1674, an eleven-year-old boy named William Logsdon traveled alone from England to America as an indentured servant, stepping off the boat in the Colony of Maryland, presumably for a job on a tobacco farm.
The cultivation of that leafy green plant was a key driver of Maryland's economy.
It was in fact one of the things England liked best about its American colonies, especially those around the Chesapeake Bay.
According to historian Joseph C. Robert, tobacco "guaranteed the permanence of the Virginia settlement, created the pattern of the Southern plantation, [and] encouraged the introduction of Negro slavery."
And, with its own source of tobacco, England need not import so much from arch-rival Spain.
After toiling on a farm for ten years to work off his indenture, William Logsdon went on to become, by his late 20s, a landowner and successful tobacco farmer.
William was not so successful at securing a wife. But he was not alone.
In America at this time, all Englishmen faced the same problem: they were all, well, men.
And they outnumbered women by as many as seven to one.
According to legend, this created an opportunity for human traffickers known as spirits.
They would bring young women, some in their teens, across the Atlantic by any means necessary--including kidnapping.
According to family lore, one such teenager was Honor O'Flynn, abducted in Ireland and then spirited away to America, never to see her family again.
Somehow--details are long lost--William Logsdon met Honor O'Flynn. They married in 1702 and went on to have eight children.
They are my seventh great-grandparents, shorthand for great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents. And that's the last time I'll say all the "greats" like that.
William and Honor's first child, my sixth great-grandmother Ann Logsdon, was born in 1703.
At the age of 20 she married Samuel Durbin, linking the Logsdon and Durbin families for the first time--but not the last.
Nobody knows for sure who Samuel's parents were, his birth date, nor how he ended up in Maryland.
To me he is the so-called brick wall in this Durbin line of ancestry.
We do know Samuel and Ann lived for a time in the community of Owings Mill and had ten children, among them our fifth great-grandfather Christopher Durbin, born in 1741.
He married Margaret Braun around 1763 and they had ten children, among them our fourth great-grandfather John Durbin.
He was born around 1772, the last of my American ancestors born technically in Great Britain.
So those are the first three Durbins of this story: Samuel, Christopher, and John.
After the signing of the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, probably hearing it read out loud by a town crier, Christopher and Margaret found themselves no longer British subjects.
They were now citizens of the United States of America, a quote "radically new thing under the sun," in the words of biographer Jon Meacham, "founded on idea, not brute force." End quote.
It's easy to forget just how radical it was.
That idea, that there would be no kings here, that a nation could and must be governed by its people, was pretty crazy.
And it would be spelled out in the 4,543 words of the United States Constitution, starting with three words all Americans learn in grade school: "We the People"
Of course "the people" in this case did not include Native Americans. Nor Black Americans, most of whom were then enslaved.
And the Declaration of Independence famously says only that "all men are created equal."
Women too were not quite among the people our founding fathers had in mind when doling out personal liberty.
Despite their shortcomings, our nation's founding principles, exclusive as they were, were also a gamble. Would the "no kings" concept endure for all time?
Nobody knew. We still don't know.
But Christopher and Margaret Durbin, and their ten kids and cousins, were right there as the great experiment in democracy got underway, from their home in the brand new state of Maryland.
And then they all left.

Chapter Two. Kentucky. 1790 to 1890. A young nation grows. Young families move.

Not long after the thirteen original colonies declared independence, starting in earnest in the 1780s, hundreds of thousands of English settlers began migrating westward, across the Appalachian Mountains, to establish new settlements and, eventually, 37 new states.
Among those migrating settlers was the family of my fifth great-grandparents Christopher and Margaret Durbin.
They left Maryland around 1790, when both were in their 40s, with ten children ranging in age from two to 25.
After a journey that took weeks, traveling on foot and probably horseback, they settled in Madison County, Kentucky, not far from the town of Lexington.
They followed the path of Christopher's cousin Elisha Logsdon and his wife Rebecca, who had brought their five Logsdon kids to Madison County a few years earlier.
Kentucky would be home to multiple Durbin and Logsdon families over the coming decades. Unfortunately, it had been someone else's home before they got there.
I have to acknowledge here the painful reality of how our family history intersects with one of the darkest chapters of US history: the genocide of Native Americans.
It's a strong word, I know, but is defined by the United Nations as "acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group."
That sounds like just what European settlers did to the people who had already been living in America for thousands of years.
Consider just one pair of numbers: In 1820, 120 thousand indigenous men, women, and children lived east of the Mississippi River.
By 1844, barely two decades later, fewer than 30 thousand were left.
Most had been forced to migrate westward, some on the so-called Trail of Tears, when thousands of Cherokee died from exposure, disease, and starvation.
Out west, things only got worse, as author Dee Brown describes it in his classic narrative non-fiction book Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.
It is a heart-wrenching and gut-punching read, like no other book before it or since.
And what did my English ancestors have to do with the fate of Native Americans? Nothing specifically or directly, to my knowledge.
But the very reason for the removal of Indians--as indigenous people were known at the time, owing to ignorance of the actual distance between Spain and India by Christopher Columbus--was to provide land to the likes of Christopher Durbin and his children and grandchildren.
Christopher and Margaret's fourth child, my fourth great-grandfather John Durbin, was around 18 years old when his family arrived in Kentucky.
He may have been happy to be reunited with his second cousin, Patience Logsdon, daughter of Elisha and Rebecca Logsdon and roughly his same age.
He hadn't seen her for nearly ten years. The affection may have been mutual. They married in 1793.
At some point in adulthood, John Durbin would lose his eyesight and become known in the family as “Uncle Blind Johnny.”
And before saying more I must acknowledge a second painful reality of how our family history intersects with yet another tragic reality in the history of this nation: slavery.
Nobody puts it better than Nikole Hannah-Jones does in her acclaimed book The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, when she describes slavery as "the forced migration of nearly 13 million people across the Atlantic [that] transformed--or, arguably, enabled--the existence of the United States."
For more than 250 years, the enslavement of human beings was as acceptable to many Americans as keeping a house pet is today.
It was certainly acceptable to our Uncle Blind Johnny, presumably a farmer, who, according to astonishingly vivid bits of family lore, enslaved his workers.
He may or may not have been the only of our ancestors to do so. But we're pretty sure HE did.
John and Patience Durbin had seven children, all born in Madison County, Kentucky, six boys and one girl.
The youngest of these was my third great-grandfather Robert Durbin, born in 1812. He married Elizabeth Hill in 1833.
Together they would have seven children. The last of these was my second great-grandfather Pius Durbin, born in Kentucky in 1847.
Pius was a boy of 13 or 14 when in 1861 Confederate forces bombed Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, sparking the American Civil War.
The rift over the expansion of slavery, between Northern and Southern states, had been growing for years.
Perched just between north and south, Kentucky at first declared neutrality.
When Confederate forces invaded anyway, Kentucky appealed for help from, and soon joined, the Union--but they did not ban slavery.
Nor did the other so-called Border States of Missouri, Delaware, and Maryland.
I've seen no records of either Pius Durbin nor his father Robert Durbin fighting in the Civil War.
Perhaps they missed combat owing to their respective ages: Pius was a young teen and his father nearly fifty.
However, another of my second great-grandfathers, Billy Gaul, and we'll see in chapter three how he fits into this family, was not so fortunate.
The thing is, Billy did not see his enlistment in the Union Army as misfortune at all--at least not at first.
Born in Ireland, this teenager had lost his father to illness soon after immigration, and his destitute mother had to give up little Billy to live with another family and to work for room and board on their farm in central Illinois.
When Abraham Lincoln made his first call for volunteers in April 1861, Billy signed up right away, perhaps seeing it as an opportunity to change his status in life from that of an "immigrant American" to just "American." We don't really know.
We do know Billy's war experience nearly killed him, not from enemy fire but from a mule kick to the head that inflicted a ghastly wound.
Eager to remain in the army, even with a brain injury that would plague him the rest of his life, Billy Gaul re-enlisted as a veteran when his initial term expired.
He remained in service until Confederate general Robert E Lee surrendered to Union general Ulysses S Grant in April 1865.
Actually, Billy stayed on for some months after, as we'll learn about in a later episode.
Back now to Pius Durbin, who would become the most itinerant of all the ancestors on my family tree.
His Midwest odyssey began when he moved out of Kentucky as a young man, going one state north to Illinois.
There, in 1870, at the age of twenty-three, he married Elizabeth Ellen Burtle of Sangamon County. She was twenty-two.
Pius and Elizabeth had two children in Illinois. The first died just before her second birthday.
They headed west with their surviving child to settle in Kansas and start a farm.
There, they had four more children, one of whom died at birth. In 1879, Elizabeth Durbin, mother of four, herself died.
Pius traveled back to Illinois to deliver the tragic news and then quickly marry his late wife's sister, Teresa.
Back in Kansas they soon had a child, my great-grandfather Oscar Durbin, born in 1881.
Life on the Kansas frontier proved too harsh for Pius and Teresa Durbin.
In 1882 they cut their losses and moved with their five surviving children to Missouri where they had four more.
But farming life was no easier there. Around 1890, with nine children in tow, Pius and Theresa Durbin traveled back to Illinois.
Crossing from Missouri into East St. Louis, they did not head north to Central Illinois, where Theresa grew up, but 90 miles southeast to the farming town of Dahlgren where they would have two more children.
Pius and Teresa Durbin would never move again.
And some of their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren would remain in Illinois for more than eight decades.
Now the cast of Durbin characters in this story includes a line of six: Samuel, Christopher, and John of Maryland. Robert and Pius of Kentucky. And little Oscar of Kansas.

Chapter Three. Illinois. 1890 to 1973. Off the farm and into the city.

When Pius and Theresa Durbin arrived in Dahlgren with nine kids in tow, to give farming a go in the Prairie State, as it was known to settlers for its vast fields of grasses, they met up with someone we've already met.
It was Civil War veteran Billy Gual and his wife Mary, who also lived in Dahlgren with ten kids of their own.
In the small town of Dahlgren, the two big Catholic families would see a lot of each other.
In 1902, Billy and Mary's daughter Margaret Gaul married Pius and Theresa's son Oscar Durbin. He was 21, she was 19.
Sadly, Margaret and Oscar's first two children died as newborns. Their third, William Durbin, my grandfather, survived. In time he was joined by a brother Owen and sister Mary.
Oscar and Margaret Durbin were grateful for their surviving children but struggled financially.
Many farmers in the early 1900s had a hard time fitting into an increasingly urbanized and industrialized America.
Unable to feed their family, Oscar and Margaret left their Dahlgren farm in 1912 and moved west to the city of East St. Louis.
There, Oscar found work, first as a streetcar operator and later as a bus driver. The family never went hungry again.
The family of Oscar and Margaret Durbin was not the only one in this story to find jobs and opportunities to make a living in East St. Louis, Illinois.
Across the Mississippi River from the more affluent St. Louis, Missouri, this once-booming industrial town is our ancestral nexus — the trunk of the family tree where all roots and branches converge.
East St. Louis owed its prosperity at the end of the 19th century and dawn of the 20th to the so-called Second Industrial Revolution and the advent of assembly lines and mass production, including the mass production of packaged meat.
Gustavus Swift transformed that industry starting in the late 1800s, shipping live animals by rail to Chicago where they were slaughtered and disassembled into packaged meat and then loaded onto refrigerated rail cars for shipment across the country.
Unfortunately, the operation required huge numbers of men and women willing to do repetitive and dangerous work for long hours at low pay.
Chicago's massive slaughtering and packing facilities were treacherous places where workers were valued little more than the hogs and cattle they butchered, places made infamous by Upton Sinclair’s classic novel The Jungle.
Economically, factory-based meatpacking was so successful that it inevitably outgrew Chicago, and East St. Louis was a perfect place for its replication.
The junction of so many rail lines there—twenty-seven at one point—was attractive to industries of all kinds.
And what had brought the railroads? Two things. Coal--vast reserves beneath the Illinois bluffs were mined furiously in the decades after the Civil War--and the Eads Bridge.
It was the first to span the lower Mississippi River and dramatically increased the flow of train traffic between east and west.
With the opening of the National Stock Yards in the 1870s, and the incorporation of National City, Illinois just outside its border, East St. Louis became a magnet for penniless immigrants with a strong back and a willingness to do whatever it took to make a living.
Our family tree is filled with just such immigrants, starting with the Malec family.
In 1905, Polish immigrants Adam Malec and Julia Walczak met at an East St. Louis boardinghouse for meatpacking workers.
A few years earlier, Adam had fled an abusive stepmother in the Polish region of Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now a part of Poland.
He walked more than six hundred miles to the port city of Hamburg, Germany, where he worked as a cobbler’s apprentice until he could afford passage to America, eventually finding his way to East St. Louis.
Teenaged Julia Walczak was a victim of human trafficking.
Deceived into believing she would be taken in by supposed “cousins” in East St. Louis, she left Galicia with her parents’ reluctant consent.
When she arrived to find no cousins waiting, she had no choice but to work long hours at a packinghouse to pay for room and board.
Adam and Julia married soon after meeting at the boardinghouse where both of them lived, and would have five children.
Their youngest was my grandmother Bronislava Malec. She went by Bernice.
Now onto the Kalish, Krokvica, and Walko families. Their stories are so intertwined they need to be told as one.
In 1906, Slovaks Stefan and Katarina Kalish left the Austro-Hungarian Empire with their three youngest children for East St. Louis, where their eldest daughter, Annie, had fled a few years earlier.
Their eldest son Louis had already followed her there.
In 1908, another Slovak, Marie Krokvica, departed Austria-Hungary with two daughters in search of her missing husband, Leonard.
She found him, drunk, in East St. Louis. Their eldest daughter was Anna.
In 1910, the two families came together when Louis Kalish married Anna Krokvica.
After losing their first child at birth, Louis and Anna had one child who survived.
My grandfather James Kalish--he went by Jim or Jimmy his entire life--was born in 1912.
For several years, Louis and Anna worked low-wage jobs in the packinghouses, until things changed dramatically in 1920--for them and the nation--with the start of Prohibition, banning the sale of alcohol in the United States.
Demand for so-called bootleg, or illegally produced liquor remained as strong as ever. And this looked like a godsend for Louis and Anna Kalish.
Teaming up with Kalish siblings and in-laws--Anna's sister Josie by this time had married Steve Walko, another Slovak immigrant--the family operation made a small fortune peddling bootleg liquor and running a brothel or two, only to lose it all after a series of misfortunes.
One of these was the death of Louis in 1926 at the age of 38. The next came with 32-year-old Anna's death the next year, leaving 15-year-old Jimmy Kalish an orphan.
His uncle and aunt, Steve and Josie Walko, took him in.
In 1933, James Kalish married Bernice Malec, daughter of Polish immigrants Adam and Julia Malec we spoke about earlier.
Jim and Bernice Kalish would have three children: Lorraine--my mother, her sister Jackie, and her brother Jim.
Throughout the 1940s, the Kalish family would enjoy the very best that East St. Louis had to offer a young family.
Lorraine and Jackie and Jim got good educations at well-equipped schools, spent free time in city parks, and took summer “vacations” at Adam and Julia Malec’s house where they were showered with attention.
Life was not so good for the Black Americans of East St. Louis at that time, nor was it ever.
In 1917, race riots ravaged the city when mobs of angry—and tragically misled—white residents feared that Southern Black migrants were taking their jobs. Elliott Rudwick depicts that long-forgotten tragedy vividly in his 1964 book Race Riot at East St. Louis.
The city remained deeply segregated until well into the 1950s and beyond.
Not even white skin and European ancestry, however, guaranteed a good life in East St. Louis.
Let me tell you about the Kutkin family.
In 1911, two-year-old Ona Kutkaite, my grandmother, arrived in East St. Louis from Lithuania.
She had traveled with her mother, Marcele, and two step-siblings to join her father who was already living there under the name Robert Kutkin.
Ona’s childhood was marked by poverty, alcoholism, and neglect.
Yet as the teenager Ann Kutkin, she summoned innate determination and remarkable intellect to forge her own path in life. She worked as a telephone operator after having to drop out of high school.
As a young woman, on a blind date, Ann met a young man with a job on the railroad. His name was William Durbin.
In the early 1900s in East St. Louis, if you didn’t work at a meat packinghouse you probably worked on the railroads.
My grandfather William Durbin spent his entire career on the railroads, starting in November 1922 when he took a job at age sixteen loading freight cars for the Pennsylvania Railroad.
He eventually rose to the position of Chief Clerk for the New York Central Railroad in East St. Louis.
In 1928, William Durbin and Ann Kutkin were married. They would have three children--all boys.
The first, William Durbin Junior, my dad, was born in 1929--just in time for the stock market crash and Great Depression that followed. I'll refer to him as Bill Durbin going forward.
His brother Bob was born in 1931.
Money was always tight for this young family. Fortunately, William Durbin had a good job on the railroad and Ann Durbin was as strong, smart, and determined as any woman who ever stepped foot in East St. Louis.
The Great Depression, and the second world war that followed, taking us out of the Depression, were the defining events of my dad and his brother Bob's childhood.
In 1944, the Durbin boys got a little brother name Richard Joseph. He went by Joe in his youth. Later he would be known to the nation as Senator Dick Durbin.
In 1952, Bill Durbin married Lorraine Kalish after meeting at Jimmy's Malt Shop on State Street when he was on leave from the Navy, fighting in the Korean War. They would eventually have ten children--nine boys and one girl.
Following his discharge from the Navy, Bill Durbin baffled his parents by ditching a seemingly safe career on the railroad, going to college for a degree in geology, and taking a civilian job with a US Air Force agency that made maps. It was a brave and costly gamble for both my parents that would, in time, pay off well.
In 1962, Bill and Lorraine Durbin moved their growing family out of East St. Louis, past Cahokia—where pre-Columbian Native Americans once thrived—and up the ancient Mississippi bluffs to a rural area known then as Fairview. That's where the rest of their children were born, starting with me.
In 1973, Dad was offered a step up the government career ladder if he relocated to Washington, DC. Off we went, 800 miles east to the town of Kensington, Maryland, just outside DC.
Mom and Dad were unaware at the time they were completing a genealogical round trip. The town of Kensington is a short drive from the Baltimore suburb of Owings Mills—where Samuel and Ann Durbin had started this One American Family exactly 250 years earlier.
In case you are keeping track of the sequence of Durbins in this story, we're up now to eight: Samuel, Christopher, and John of Maryland. Robert and Pius of Kentucky. Oscar of Kansas. And William and Bill of Illinois.

Chapter Four. Back to Maryland. 1973 to the present day.

Real estate around Washington, DC is more costly than it is in Southern Illinois. The was as true in 1973 as it is today.
But Bill and Lorraine Durbin wanted the best location they could afford, and pricey Montgomery County, Maryland appealed to them most.
To make it work, they moved their family of twelve -- into a house sized perfectly for a family of four.
They had simply bought their retirement house a few decades early, they would later explain, figuring every couple of years another kid would leave the nest and free up space.
And that's pretty much what happened.
Dad continued his government work at a place called the Defense Mapping Agency. The DMA office was located on the lush and gated grounds of the US Naval Observatory, just next to where the Vice President lives.
Unknown to us, he spent many of his days working across the Potomac River at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
It would be decades before anyone in his family, including his wife, knew what he did there--or even that he *was* there.
We moved to Washington just as the US withdrew combat forces from Viet Nam, bringing an end to that national trauma, and just as the Watergate scandal brought an end to the administration of President Richard Nixon.
We watched him resign, live, on a black-and-white TV in the wood-paneled basement of our house in Kensington, nine miles up Connecticut Avenue from the White House.
Richard Nixon: "But the interest of the nation must always come before any personal considerations... therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow."
Suburban Washington was a great place to grow up--rich in history, close to national events as they happened, and filled with cultural institutions.
Seven of us Durbin boys went to Walter Johnson High School--named for the legendary pitcher from the old Washington Senators baseball team.
And we took many bus rides down Connecticut Avenue, to the Smithsonian museums, the Capitol, the National Mall, and more.
There is much to tell from this fourth chapter of family history, not only about the family I was born into and our time in Maryland, but also about my dad's youngest brother, Dick Durbin.
His home remains in Illinois, but his job on Capitol Hill brought him to nearby Washington DC all the time. So we got to see a fair amount of our Uncle Dick.
Like many American families, there is a history of heart disease in this one.
Owing to that, and to a Depression-era diet that did not include an abundance of heart-healthy foods, we lost Dad to a heart attack in February 2001.
Although his health issues had been mounting, losing him at the age of seventy-one was still a shock.
After Dad’s passing, some of the ten kids remained in Maryland to make homes and start families of their own. Some had already relocated to other states.
Over the next twenty years, Mom watched all of us live our lives from that little house in Kensington and later from the top floor of the Kensington House apartments, eventually moving in with her daughter Barb and son-in-law Max in downstate Maryland.
In 2024, after six years away from Kensington, Lorraine Durbin, at age ninety, decided she wanted to return there for “her last stop,” as she called it. The metaphor was appropriate.
The assisted living facility where she now lives is on the town railroad tracks.
She moved into a unit whose window is not more than fifty feet from those tracks.
When a train roars by, as it does all the time, conversation pauses, Mom smiles wide, then explains. It just reminds her of East St. Louis, she says.

This One American Family has come a long way since colonial times. So too has democracy, albeit slowly.
In a 1965 speech, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. paraphrased the 19th-century abolitionist Theodore Parker
[Excerpt: Martin Luther King: "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice"]
In 1865, slavery had been abolished in the United States with the ratification of the 13th Amendment.
But it took another hundred years, until 1965--the very year Dr. King made that speech--for the passage of the Voting Rights Act, finally giving Black Americans rights that White Americans had enjoyed since the birth of this nation.
Native Americans were granted full citizenship only in 1924, and it would be decades before getting full voting rights in every state.
And what of women, who comprise an entire half of America's citizenry?
In 1920, the 19th Amendment granted them the federally enforced, legal right to vote. Other rights had to wait.
Only in 1974 were women guaranteed the right to a credit card or loan without a man's consent and signature.
My mother Lorraine Durbin managed 100% of this family's finances, paying every bill and balancing every bank account for decades.
But when my sister Barb went to the Lincoln Trail Bank in the early 1970s, to open her first bank account, Mom, as a woman, couldn't help.
Dad had to go and put his signature on the application for a credit card.
American women, Black Americans, and Native Americans had to wait a long time for guaranteed rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Another group is still waiting: Hard-working Immigrant Americans who lack work authorization.
As I write these words in the fall of 2026, they are prey to what the current administration proudly refers to as The Largest Deportation Operation in American History.
I myself am 100% immigrant American: A 3rd generation Lithuanian-American immigrant, a 4th generation Slovak-American and Polish-American immigrant, a 5th generation Irish-American immigrant, and 9th generation English-American immigrant.
I owe my existence to this nation opening its doors to my ancestors who came here from another country, some with documentation and some without, but all of whom needed a new home and were willing to work incredibly hard to deserve one, all the while making this nation a better place.
I'm just lucky my ancestors arrived when they did. Those doors aren't so wide open as they once were.
Dramatic recent changes in US immigration policy are just one of the ways democracy is being put to a test these days.
Just read the 2018 book How Democracies Die, by Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, or their 2024 follow-up book Tyranny of the Minority.
So the great experiment continues. And this one American family continues to bear witness.

There is much to tell in this podcast. Fortunately I'll get some help. In future episodes you'll hear from my cousin Beth Volkmann
[Excerpt: Beth Volkmann: "I do remember going over to their house as an adult, their apartment on Indiana"]
my Aunt Jackie Mahoney
[Excerpt: Jackie Mahoney: "my father had a 1940 Plymouth"]
and Uncle Jim Kalish
[Excerpt: Jim Kalish: "our school district did not have a kindergarten, at that time"]
my brother Dan
[Excerpt: Dan Durbin: "East St. Louis was named an all-American city, which is amazing if you fast forward ten years"]
my mom Lorraine Durbin
[Excerpt: Lorraine Durbin: "they were called a shotgun house because you could actually shoot a gun at the front door, and it would go through the house to the backyard"]
and from Senator Dick Durbin
[Excerpt: Dick Durbin: "I was a paper boy. It was my first job....I was in the third grade at the time. Much too young to do that sort of thing"]
I owe each of them my thanks.
Speaking of thanks, I am grateful beyond words to my late father Bill Durbin and late uncle Bob Durbin for their years of deep family research on my dad's side of the family. I miss them both.
I also cannot thank my cousin Ann Mahoney enough, for her years of documenting family history on my mom's side.
This podcast is only possible thanks to that trio of genealogical collaborators, and to my late third cousin (twice removed) Ross Durbin, and to countless contributors to my favorite genealogy web site of them all: WikiTree.
And with that, let me wrap up this episode and get to work on the next one.

Thank you for listening to One American Family.

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To learn more about my family history or check out my sources, visit oneamericanfamily.com.
You can contact me at michaeldurbin919@gmail.com.