1. A fabric membership monitoring method that comprises: determining a polling list of switches; and for each switch (hereafter “the current switch”) in the polling list of switches: obtaining a list of sister switches from the current switch; associating the current switch with a new kith if the current switch is not already associated with a kith; identifying any of the sister switches associated with different kiths and merging said different kiths with the kith of the current switch; and associating each of the sister switches with the kith of the current switch.