TRUE BLOOD
He always looked different – turns out he was switched at birth
Growing up in a rural town near Buffalo, NY, Andy Perkins had a sense of misplacement in his own family.
Perkins has blue eyes and light hair. His parents and siblings all had darker complexions and were taller. He was outgoing, while they were more reserved.
“I have always looked different from the rest of my family,” Perkins, 73, who now lives in Grand Prairie, Texas, told The Post. “It’s caused me problems.”
He started acting out in middle school. He had severe ADHD and started to believe he may have been adopted, but it was dismissed as adolescent rebellion. Overall, his childhood was happy, and parents Shirley and Jim were loving.
“Most people have those feelings in their teenage years, like they don’t belong,” said Perkins.
Decades later, he would find out it wasn’t just teen angst.
In 2015, his daughter, Candi Perkins Summers, now 47, started looking into her family history. In 2017, she gave her parents DNA tests using Ancestry.com and realized her father was not biologically related to any of the Perkinses.
Instead, she noticed her dad was related to a slew of people with the last name Robinson scattered throughout Rochester and Warsaw, NY — where Perkins was born.
A revealing DNA test told
“It was odd,” Summers The Post.
It took her dad some time to process the situation. She and her father were convinced he was not adopted, and also couldn’t imagine that the religious parents who had raised him would have strayed from their marital vows.
Then, in 2020, she found an archived newspaper clipping with her father’s birth announcement. Just below the announcement for Andy, she found a reference to a boy named Philip, said to be born to Harold S. and Pauline McElwain Robinson on Sept. 12 in Warsaw — supposedly the day before her father was born in the same small hospital.
“I realized the parents that raised [my father] were not his biological parents,” Summers said.
That’s when she told her dad: He was likely switched at birth.
“It all made sense,” Perkins said. The discovery left him feeling validated and relieved.
The two also surmised that baby Philip, who died at age 6 from non-Hodgkin lymphoma, had actually been Shirley and Jim Perkins’ biological son.
Perkins’ biological mother, Pauline McElwain Robinson, was a longtime Warsaw resident who worked as a lab technician at Wyoming County Community Hospital and died in 2015 at age 90.
Grieving what was lost
Perkins’ biological father, Harold S. Robinson, was in the Army and served in South Korea at the end of World War II before becoming an insurance agent. He died in 2016 at age 88.
“I went to the graveyards of my biological mother and father. I started a grieving process — not only grieving that I never met them, but grieving their death,” Perkins said. “It was an unexpected and difficult thing.”
In July 2020, Perkins was, however able to connect with his biological siblings — Sally, 69; Brian, 68; Lisa, 58; and Doug, who has since passed away.
“Once we all met that summer, we were calling each other almost every day,” Perkins said. “I’ve been welcomed with open arms. It’s fun to sit around and see how similar we are having grown up in two different worlds.” He noted that they all love liverwurst and, while listening to music, tend to switch songs halfway through.
In 2021, Perkins and Summers — who both work for a nonprofit that provides aid to Africa — also revealed the news to the woman who raised him, Shirley Perkins.
She responded by saying,: “Isn’t the Lord good?” A few months later, at age 91, she died.
Perkins, who now uses Robinson-Perkins as his surname, thinks the discovery brought everyone a sense of peace and closure.
“I felt like I found out who I am. I became closer to my Perkins family and my Robinson family,” he said. “Many people have no family. I am rich with two wonderful, loving families.”