DNA test reveals secrets of the past
A DNA test uncovers a mystery that shakes one woman’s family — as well as a family of strangers
Five years ago, Alice Collins Plebuch made a decision that would alter her future — or really, her past.
She sent away for a “just-for-fun DNA test.” When the tube arrived, she spit and spit until she filled it up to the line, and then sent it off in the mail. She wanted to know what she was made of.
Plebuch, now 69, already had a rough idea of what she would find. Her parents, both deceased, were Irish-American Catholics who raised her and her six siblings with church Sundays and ethnic pride. But Plebuch, who had a long-standing interest in science and DNA, wanted to know more about her dad’s side of the family. The son of Irish immigrants, Jim Collins had been raised in an orphanage from a young age, and his extended family tree was murky.
After a few weeks, during which her saliva was analyzed, she got an email in the summer of 2012 with a link to her results. The report was confounding.
About half of Plebuch’s DNA results presented the mixed British Isles bloodline she expected. The other half picked up an unexpected combination of European Jewish, Middle Eastern and Eastern European. Surely someone in the lab had messed up. She wrote the company a nasty letter informing them they’d made a mistake.
But she talked to her sister, and they agreed she should test again. If the information Plebuch was seeing on her computer screen was correct, it posed a fundamental mystery about her very identity.
Eventually, Plebuch would write to Ancestry again. You guys were right, she’d say. I was wrong.
We are only just beginning to grapple with what it means to cheaply and easily uncover our genetic heritage.
Over the past five years, as the price of DNA testing kits has dropped and their quality has improved, the phenomenon of “recreational genomics” has taken off. According to the International Society of Genetic Genealogy, nearly eight million people worldwide have tested their DNA through kits, typically costing US$99 or less, from such companies as 23andMe, Ancestry.com and Family Tree DNA.
But DNA testing can yield uncomfortable surprises.
“We see it every day,” says CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist and consultant for the PBS series Finding Your Roots. She runs a 54,000-person Facebook group, DNA Detectives, that helps people unravel their genetic ancestries. “You find out that a lot of things are not as they seem, and a lot of families are much more complex than you assume.”
After the initial shock of her test results, Plebuch wondered if her mother might have had an affair. Or her grandmother, perhaps? So, she and her sister, Gerry Collins Wiggins, both ordered DNA testing kits from 23andMe.
As they waited for their results, they wondered. If the Ancestry. com findings were right, it meant one of Plebuch’s parents was at least partly Jewish. But which one?
She and her sister came up with a plan: They would persuade two of their first cousins to get tested — their mother’s nephew and their father’s nephew. If one of those cousins was partly Jewish, they’d know for sure which side of the family was contributing the mysterious heritage.
The men agreed. The sisters sent their kits and waited.
Then Plebuch’s own 23andMe results came back. They seemed consistent with her earlier Ancestry.com test, indicating lots of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry from areas such as Belarus, Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania. She also discovered that her brother Bill had recently taken a 23andMe test. His results were a relief — sort of.
“No hanky-panky,” as Plebuch puts it. They were full siblings, sharing about 50 per cent of the relevant DNA, including the same mysterious Jewish ancestry.
Plebuch found a feature on 23andMe’s website showing what segments along her chromosomes were associated with Ashkenazi Jews. Flipping back and forth, comparing her DNA to her brother’s, she had a sudden insight.
There was a key difference between the images, lurking in the sex chromosomes. Along the X chromosome were blue segments indicating where she had Jewish ancestry, which could theoretically have come from either parent because females inherit one X from each. But males inherit only one X, from their mothers, along with a Y chromosome from their fathers, and when Plebuch looked at her brother’s results, “darned if Bill’s X chromosome wasn’t lily white.” Clearly, their mother had contributed no Jewish ancestry to her son.
“That was when I knew that my father was the one,” Plebuch says.
But how could their father have been Jewish?
Now they really needed the data from the cousin on their father’s side. If he also had Jewish ancestry, Plebuch figured, that could point to a family secret buried in Europe.
At last, Plebuch was alerted that her cousins’ results were ready. The data from their mom’s nephew revealed that he was a full first cousin, as expected — sharing about 12.5 per cent of his DNA with Plebuch.
But the results from her dad’s nephew, Pete Nolan, whose mother was Jim Collins’ sister, revealed him to be a total stranger, genetically speaking. No overlap whatsoever with Plebuch — or, by extension, with her father.
In other words, Plebuch’s cousin wasn’t actually her cousin.
And her dad’s sister wasn’t actually his sister.
Plebuch was devastated. This finding knocked out the secret Jews theory — but if it put Plebuch closer to the truth, she still felt unmoored. She was deeply fond of Nolan, with whom she shared a birthday. “I was afraid he was going to reject me because we were no longer biological cousins.”
She called Nolan to share the results of his DNA test.
“He was sad,” Plebuch says, “but he also told me I was the best cousin he ever had.”
Plebuch and Wiggins came to the stunning conclusion that their dad was somehow not related to his own parents. John and Katie Collins were Irish Catholics, and their son was Jewish.
“I really lost all my identity,” Plebuch says. “I felt adrift. I didn’t know who I was — you know, who I really was.”
The sisters set about methodically pursuing several theories. With Jim Collins and his parents long dead, Plebuch knew she needed to unravel his story through the living. She signed up to take a class in Seattle on how to use DNA to find her father’s relatives.
By early 2013, the Collins children were hot on the trail of a hundred-year-old mystery.
They had their father’s birth certificate, indicating that he’d been born on Sept. 23, 1913. They wrote to his orphanage and learned that their father had been sent there by the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
Plebuch wondered if Jim Collins, just a baby at the time, had somehow been confused with another child when he was taken from his father’s home. She found a forensic artist said to be skilled in understanding how faces change over time. She sent her a picture of her dad sitting on his father’s lap when he was about 11 months, along with photos of him as an adult. Were these of the same person?
Probably, the forensic artist ruled. The ears hadn’t changed, and the mouth, chin and facial proportions seemed the same.
If the mystery of their father didn’t begin with his parents’ life in Ireland, nor with his own time in the orphanage, Plebuch and her sister concluded it must have happened shortly after Jim was born. Unusually for the era, his mother gave birth not at home but at Fordham Hospital in the Bronx. Could something have happened there?
By this time, the sisters were using techniques developed by Moore and others to help adoptees try to find relatives in a vast universe of strangers’ spit. Every time a site like 23andMe informed them of what Plebuch calls a “DNA cousin” on their Jewish side — someone whose results suggested a likely cousin relationship — they would ask to see that person’s genome. If the person agreed, the site would reveal any places where their chromosomes overlapped.
The work was slow and painstaking, but the sisters forged on, sending at least 1,000 requests for genome-sharing to DNA cousins through 23andMe.
Ultimately, the crack in the case came not through Plebuch’s squad of helpful DNA cousins, but through a stranger with no genetic connection.
It was Jan. 18, 2015, a Sunday, and Plebuch was feeling down. She was writing an email to her cousin Pete Nolan — the beloved relative it turned out she wasn’t really related to — to update him on her stalled search.
As administrator of his 23andMe account, she had permission to check the list of his DNA relatives yet rarely did so, since new relatives rarely showed up. But she decided to check it this day — and this time, there was a new person. A stranger had just had her saliva processed, and she showed up as a close relative of Nolan.
Plebuch emailed the woman and asked if she would compare genomes with Nolan. The woman agreed, and Plebuch could see the segments where her cousin and the stranger overlapped. Plebuch thanked her, and asked if her results were what she expected.
“I was actually expecting to be much more Ashkenazi than I am,” the woman wrote. Her name was Jessica Benson, a North Carolina resident who had taken the test on a whim, hoping to learn more about her Jewish ethnicity. Instead, she wrote, she had discovered “that I am actually Irish, which I had not expected at all.”
Plebuch felt chills. She wrote back that her father had been born at Fordham Hospital on Sept. 23, 1913. Had anyone in the Benson family been born on that date?
Jessica replied. Her grandfather, Phillip Benson, might have been born around that date, she wrote. Plebuch began to cry.
She started combing through her list of baby names from the 1913 Index. No “Benson” born that day in the Bronx. But then, well after midnight, she found it:
The New York City Birth Index had a “Philip Bamson,” born Sept. 23 — one of the names she had searched among her DNA cousins. This had to be Phillip Benson, his name misrecorded on his birth certificate.
Plebuch knew in her bones what had happened. This was no ancient family secret, buried by shame or forgotten by generations.
This was a mistake that no one had ever detected, a mistake that could only have been uncovered with DNA technology. Someone in the hospital back in 1913 had messed up. Somehow, a Jewish child had gone home with an Irish family, and an Irish child had gone home with a Jewish family.
And the child who was supposed to be Phillip Benson had instead become Jim Collins.
Pam Benson was stunned by what this stranger was telling her over the phone.
“I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ ” says Pam, who is Jessica’s aunt and the daughter of the late Phillip Benson.
The Lawndale, Calif., woman sent off for her own DNA kit and discovered that, rather than being part Jewish as she’d long thought, she was part Irish, and first cousins with a man she’d never heard of — Plebuch’s “Irish cousin,” Pete Nolan.
The families compared the birth certificates for Jim Collins and Phillip Benson and found they were one number apart and signed by the same doctor, suggesting they were processed close together in time.
Plebuch and Pam Benson took to calling each other “swapcuz,” though in fact they share no genetic relation. And now Plebuch discovered she had a real new first cousin: Phylis Pullman, the daughter of the biological sister Jim never knew.
In January, several members of the Collins family joined Pullman and Pam Benson on a cruise. It was oddly comfortable, Pullman says — no strangeness among strangers, as if blood recognized blood.
“It was like we’re all one big swap family,” she says.
But the revelations have also felt like a loss. Pam Benson’s late father was a Jew, only he wasn’t, and sometimes her daughter would come home and catch Pam crying over what he would have thought of this. How were she and Plebuch to reconcile that their fathers weren’t what they thought they were?
And yet, were it not for what happened in 1913, Alice Collins Plebuch would not exist. The Collins children owe their lives to an administrative oversight. A nurse’s momentary lapse of attention, perhaps. It was a terrible thing, and yet, how can they resent that it happened?
Plebuch says she and her siblings decided as a family “we were not going to be bitter.” It is a complex feat, made necessary by oldfashioned error and modern-day technology, to grasp that a terrible thing happened, and that you are grateful for it.
Nor does Plebuch regret what she’s learned. She does not regard DNA testing as a Pandora’s box better left closed, though this thing she undertook casually turned out, she says, to be “the biggest deal in the world.”
It is the truth, after all.
I really lost all my identity. I felt adrift. I didn’t know who I was — you know, who I really was.