FAMILY TREE

Dipping into that messy pot which is one's family tree, or family history, has not been one of my main hobbies, but I do have a fairly good idea of what went on for a few generations back, thanks to the sterling work of others. My cousin in the Cotswolds has done much good research work; but my late father started things going when he produced a file of family goings-on, written notes, newspaper cuttings, photographs, and so on, and in which he also attempted to produce a diagram showing how all these relationships fitted together in the grand Robinson scheme of things.
On my maternal side things were fairly straight-forward. My mother's parents kept a shop in Long Sutton (Lincs), which might have been described as an ironmongery business but in fact sold household goods as well. At the back of the shop was a one-storey wooden joinery workshop, built in the 1880s and currently scheduled, I believe, for demolition. Another branch of her family went into a different line of business in Nottingham, changing to babywear and nursery equipment. I recall that their shop basement, which they used as a stock store, flooded every time the Trent got slightly out of control.
The other side of her family were largely Lincolnshire (Holland district) marshland farmers. Indeed, I have a photograph somewhere of my mother, as a young girl, helping to deliver milk with a pony and cart; I also have a copy of a programme, from the early 1920s, in which she was a solo singer; and I remember just after the War cycling on a fortnightly basis to one of our relations' farms in Sutton St James, five or six miles away, and returning with eggs in my saddlebag.
My paternal side is slightly more complicated, for my father's father was a baker in Bloxham and later in Chipping Norton (both Oxfordshire). Prior to that, most of the family seem to have been small farmers (brewing their own beer, apparently) in Bloxham. So on the Robinson side I come from a line of good, sturdy, hard-working (today's obligatory buzzword) Cotswold small farmers and brewers. An academic gene was also injected into the family tree by another branch which included a former curator of Shakespeare's house in Stratford Upon Avon.
A disappointing facet is that neither my cousin nor my father managed to push the Robinson line back much further than around 1803. We know there were earlier Robinsons, possibly in Banbury, but no link has so far been found. No certificates, no records, no clues. Might they have been chapel people? Might their births, death and marriages (this was a generation before the Registration Act) not have been recorded? Family history is silent on the matter.
Now comes news that all might not have been lost. My cousin tells me she thinks she may have found an early Robinson link - unconfirmed, for there is much more work to be done - not with Chipping Norton, Banbury, or even Bloxham, but with Deddington, which is in the same neck of the woods.
The odd thing is - and I am not, I hope, counting chickens before the hatch - we have driven through Deddington several times on our way from Chipping Norton to Norfolk. Indeed, the last time we were there we stopped briefly to sniff the air. A nice place of honey-coloured houses, a village with a 'town' centre and a football team with Town in its title. A place with no rail or canal links, famed for a succession of 18th century clockmakers. 
Not long ago I even came across an old guidebook which said that years ago the place was known as 'drunken Deddington.' Coincidence, or what?