Robinson Genealogy

In an e-mail chat with a Robinson lady from my ggrandfather's home town, a lady new to the tricks of finding your way around familytreedna's website, she mentioned that she was going to see how many people she was connected to by checking all the website instead of the just in the Robinson group, and I realized I hadn't done that, either!

I went in and checked to see all the website, and lo and behold-instead of having only one exact match who happens to be a Robinson, I find I had 7 exact matches including the Robinson one. The rest did not have the surname of Robinson, much to my surprise. The same thing is happening to my friend. Most of her many matches were not of the surname, Robinson.

Here I have been grousing that we have had no matches and wondering why, with such a well-known surname. This just adds more of a mystery to my family. Actually, Robinson in the British Isles probably existed for quite some time, at least to the 1500's, I believe. Now if it was in Russia, surnames were not adopted there until about the 1800's. So to find people that are a match (at the 12 allele level) that do not have the same surname was a surprise to me.