United States: Does Joe "Robinette" Biden have French origins?

Robinette… Does Joe Biden's “middle name” - that intermediate name that American families give to their newborns, generally to pay homage to an ancestor - sounds very French?

This is what also thinks the elected president of the United States, who will be invested this Wednesday, January 20, as he confided in 2008 to a television channel: “It is the maiden name of my grandmother.

It's French!

And that goes back a very long time.

It seems that the Robinettes came with La Fayette and never left.

I do not know.

It is not guaranteed, ”he admitted however.

And indeed,

Claiming French ancestors who came to fight for the independence of America in 1777 alongside the “hero of two worlds” is as chic as it is… false.

The conclusions of Jean-Louis Beaucarnot are ruthless: "This fable falls apart, the Robinettes are not French," explains the famous genealogist, who had explored the family roots of the new president, just before his election in November.

His article, which appeared in the Revue française de genealogy, traces the thread back to a certain Allen Robinette, who arrived in Pennsylvania with his wife and children in 1682 or 1694, nearly a century before General La Fayette.

Did he come from France?

Obviously not, since it was in London that the future

was married in 1653, long before taking the boat for the New World.

Unless, perhaps, Allen's father was a French Protestant, like so many Huguenots driven out of the kingdom (and exiled in England or the present-day Netherlands ...) by the dragonnades of Louis XIV in the end of the 17th century?

Possible French ancestors in the… 13th century

There, the French or English experts get lost in conjectures.

If some put forward the hypothesis of a native of Soissons emigrated across the Channel, English genealogists, for their part, “are very divided at the level of the father of this Allen, with, for some, a Richard Robinett, from Surrey, and for the others a James Robinette and a line traced back over several generations in England, to a John Robinette, born around 1487, therefore well before the Huguenot exodus ”, details Jean-Louis Beaucarnot in his study.

To attribute to the new boss of the United States (who claims Irish roots through two of his great-grandparents) a more labeled French origin, we have to go back to the ... 13th century, "to a grandmother named Margaret Tyndal, who will reveal herself descend from a Blanche de Savoie (born in 1267 and grandmother of Biden in the 22nd generation), daughter of a Louis of Savoy and of a Jeanne de Montfort, through whom we discover ancestors in Biden in the Paris region ”, details the genealogist.

Which had had less trouble finding a French ancestor - a Huguenot from Nantes - to Barack Obama!