As a kid, I used to wonder about a couple of my uncles.
They were friendly guys, easy to get along with and good uncles to have, but they loved to fight.
According to my dad - their younger brother - they didn’t need to be angry or offended to fight someone. If a person just wanted to duke it out for a while, they were more than happy to oblige.
Even though they were small guys, the uncles were wiry and quick-fisted and usually won, Dad said.
And then there was the story of how that side of the family wound up in the Indian Territory back before the turn of the 20th Century.
My great-grandpa, Levi Robins, was a farmer in Tennessee and apparently doing ok for himself and his large family.
But then one day he got in a fight. You may notice a trend here.
The other guy pulled a knife, so Greatgrandpa Levi beat him to death with a fence post.
It was a clear case of self-defense, the sheriff said, but he doubted the decedent’s family would see it that way and most likely would come looking for vengeance.
So, Levi went home, packed up his family and moved to the Indian Territory. Dad said he remembered Levi carrying a rifle and keeping it close for the rest of his life because he figured the other guy’s family would eventually stumble on to him.
It was in the Indian Territory that Jennie Robins, Levi’s daughter and my grandma, met and married into the Blansetts and produced the uncles mentioned above.
Grandpa Blansett had wound up in the Indian Territory because James Blansett, another great-grandpa, had engaged in criminal activity in the Ozarks and was lynched in 1890.
So, as a kid, I wondered about circumstances that produced good-natured people who just liked to fight and great-grandpas that killed or were killed. It didn’t make a lot of sense.
On Sunday, Kindra and I walked past a line of booths and tents, each displaying tartans or crests and lists of Scottish names.
It was the Oklahoma Highland Gathering in Choctaw and different Scottish clans were represented.
At the fourth or fifth booth, a name caught my eye: Robbins.
If you allow for dropping a B through the decades or centuries, things that used to not make much sense suddenly did.
My great-grandpa, my uncles... Maybe they were just following the ancient, peat-scented call of their DNA.
Centuries of Scotsmen doing battle with the English invaders and Bravehearting in defense of their homes and families - that’s the kind of ancestry that certainly could lead to what became typical Robins behavior.
When we got home from the Gathering, Kindra and I checked our ancestry reports on yonder web site. She clocked in at 30 percent Scottish, while I was a mere 10 percent.
But I figure, hey. It’s probably a strong 10 percent.
And it would explain a lot of things. I also noticed on Google that there is a Clan Robbins.
So I am thinking about joining yonder clan. And I am also keeping a sharper eye on Kindra these days, seeing as she is three times more Scottish than I am.