Every family has a beginning. Ours starts with two people: Nathaniel "Tobud", born in 1896, and Elizabeth "Clu", born in 1907. They raised six children: Leroy, Arcenia, Nathaniel, Kenneth, William, and Ernest on a piece of North Carolina soil, never knowing that decades later, their family would number in the hundreds.
Those six children had children. Those children had children. And those children had children of their own. Five, six generations deep now, the family has spread up the entire East Coast, from Florida to New York, carrying pieces of Nathaniel and Elizabeth with them wherever they landed.
I didn't start out in the family. I married in. My wife's father is a son of Leroy, son of Nathaniel. I came into this family the way a lot of people come into families: through love, and then through years of Sunday dinners and cookouts and reunions before it ever felt like mine. But it did become mine. That's what this family does to you.
The Reunion, Held Together by Hand
For decades, it was the third generation, Nathaniel's grandchildren, who carried the family. Every year or two, someone would pick up the phone and start the chain: calling cousins, who called their kids, who called their cousins. Whisper down the lane, but with venues and hotel blocks and casseroles on the line.
Someone was always in charge of collecting money, cash, checks, whatever people could send. Someone booked the hall. Someone figured out the food, the entertainment, the T-shirts everybody would wear so you could spot family in a crowd of strangers. And more often than not, whoever organized it ate the difference when the numbers didn't quite add up.
It wasn't efficient. It wasn't easy. But it worked, because it had to. Keeping the family together was the job. Not a nice-to-have, the whole point.
Passing the Torch
Nathaniel and Elizabeth are gone now. So are all six of their children. The generation that held the reunions together for so long is tired, rightfully so, after decades of doing this by hand. It was time to pass the torch to the next generation: a handful of Gen Z and elder-millennials who raised their hands and said, we've got this.
I raised mine too, but my angle was different. I couldn't tell you every family story or remember every cousin's name off the top of my head. What I could do was look at everything the family was doing manually, the phone trees, the spreadsheets, the Venmo requests scattered across a dozen threads, and ask: what if technology just... handled this?
The First Version of Kinloom
So a few of us got to work. We built an app, a simple one at first, to handle registration, payments, T-shirt sizes, meal choices. We added a family feed, a directory, a family tree people could actually explore, and an In Memoriam to honor the ones who'd passed before we could show them what we'd built.
What surprised me wasn't the technology. It was watching what it did for people. The new leads organizing the reunion weren't drowning anymore. Anyone in the family could open the app and know the itinerary, see who was coming, chip in for a cousin who needed to pay in installments, and feel connected to relatives they'd never met in person. Over 100 people registered. Thousands of dollars moved through it, cleanly, transparently, without anyone quietly covering a shortfall out of pocket.
Watching that relief on the organizers' faces, that's the moment I knew this couldn't stop with one family.
From One Family to Every Family
That's why I built Kinloom.
Every family reunion, every milestone birthday, every "we really should all get together", they all run into the same walls: who's coming, who's paying, who's planning, who's remembering. This family had been solving those problems by hand for fifty years, because that's what families do. They show up for each other, even when the logistics are a mess.
Kinloom exists to take the mess off the table, not the meaning. We're still building, helping families find the best date for an event before it becomes fifteen conflicting group texts, helping them find venues and entertainment without starting from zero, making it simple to message the whole family or just the planning committee without anything getting lost.
We have a long way to go. But the reason for all of it hasn't changed since the first line of code: helping family be family, and keeping families together.
That's what Nathaniel and Elizabeth started without ever knowing it. We're just trying to help carry it forward.