Microbial communities were some of the first agglomerations of living beings on the planet but even today the biophysical principles underpinning their spatiotemporal evolution remain mysterious. In this talk, to understand the way cells are organized in microbial colonies, we will study the intermixing dynamics of descendants of individual bacterial cells in colonies of surface-associated bacterial species. For this, we implement a custom-built label-free algorithm to track the progeny of individual cells as they grow and divide in such colonies, revealing the formation of distinct enclaves within the colony comprising descendants of individual cells, thus displaying a spatial affinity for close relatives, at the cost of the entropically favorable option of intermixing. Dependence on biological activity is a distinctive feature of the intermixing dynamics at the enclave scale in the colony. We show that the evolution of such enclaves, which display a high degree of self-similarity with the colony at large on several key phenotypic traits, is regulated by the dynamics of topological defects in the colonies. Coarse-grained lattice modelling of such colonies highlights the physical reason behind the formation of progeny enclaves which can be ascribed to the tendency of daughter cells to stick together after division. Our study uncovers several so-far hidden features of emergent organization within bacterial colonies at intermediate scales, ultimately pointing at the biological benefits of proximity to close kith and kin.