Kendall:
I was born in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. My father was Kendall Kidder, born in Mogollon, New Mexico, in 1919, from a line started by James Ensign Kidder in 1633 or 1634 in what became Cambridge, Mass. My son is named Kendall Kidder - somewhere way back there our folks knew each other.
All these connections remind me of what Kurt Vonnegut called "granfallons" - meaningless associations used by strangers to make meaningless bonds. Vonnegut wrote about two people meeting each other on an airplane, discovering that they were both from Indiana "What?? Your're a Hoosier too?", and using this as a pretext to fall into conversation.
John Kidder