Who yo people?

Robyne Larking-Damond, MPH is the founder of The Kinstructure Company, LLC, a Louisiana heritage preservation and genealogy business serving the Louisiana diaspora nationwide. Operating under the tagline "Where Louisiana Finds Louisiana," the company helps people with Louisiana roots find each other and their family histories wherever they now call home. Its work spans guided genealogy Heritage Discovery Sessions, custom family tree Heritage Designs, KinStory memorial genealogy, and the Kinstructure Kinnect professional directory connecting Louisiana people across the diaspora. The company works alongside community initiatives that sponsor art students with supplies and support local homeschool groups in their work with youth.

Robyne began genealogical research in 2008 and has since done cultural preservation work for organizations and events across Louisiana. She serves on the board of the Cane River Film Festival and holds memberships in the Association of Professional Genealogists and the National Genealogical Society. Her professional background spans more than eighteen years leading large-scale public health and government programs. She currently leads a statewide Texas program ensuring that children and adults diagnosed with rare genetic disorders have access to care.

Through The Kinstructure Company, Robyne also provides consulting in program operations, compliance, project management, process improvement, and content strategy, bringing the same operational rigor to mission-driven organizations that she brings to government work. Across the public health, academic, and genealogy spaces, her work is rooted in a single conviction: that access to care, to knowledge, and to one's own history shapes how people live and thrive.

YaYa is a professional historian, research consultant, genealogist, and writer with more than twenty-five years of experience — archival research, the restoration of historic burial grounds, museum curation, and community education. She has served as a trusted researcher for the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the National Park Service. She is a contractor with AncestryProGenealogists, contributes to ARRAY's Queen Sugar 101 Learning Companion, and has received grants from the SSRC and the Ford Foundation. She is a Ph.D. candidate at Jackson State University and has begun a second Ph.D. at Southern University at Baton Rouge, and is a proud member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.

What sets YaYa apart is her gift for making complex history personal. She meets people where they are — whether they arrive with a single family name or decades of records — and helps them find a way forward. At Who Yo People?, she sits one-on-one with families after they record.