DNA, persistence reveal family shocker – Fort Wayne Journal Gazette

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. It was the early days of direct-to-consumer DNA testing, and Ancestry.com's test was new. 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.

Popular practice

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 8 million people worldwide, but mostly in the United States, have tested their DNA through kits, typically costing $99 or less, from such companies as 23andMe, Ancestry.com and Family Tree DNA.

The most popular DNA-deciphering approach, autosomal DNA testing, looks at genetic material inherited from both parents and can be used to connect customers to others in a database who share that material. The results can let you see exactly what stuff you're made from as well as offer the opportunity to find previously unknown relatives.

But DNA testing can also yield 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.

Testing others

After the initial shock of her test results, Plebuch wondered whether her mother might have had an affair. Or her grandmother, perhaps? So, she and her sister, Gerry Collins Wiggins, both ordered kits from DNA testing company 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 plunged into online genealogy forums, researching how other people had traced their DNA and educating herself about the science. 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. 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 percent 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. 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.

The data from their mom's nephew revealed that he was a full first cousin, as expected sharing about 12.5 percent 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.

Plebuch and Wiggins came to the stunned conclusion that their dad was somehow not related to his own parents. John and Katie Collins were Irish Catholics, and their son was Jewish.

Surprise twist

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.

By this time, the sisters were using techniques 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 idea, Plebuch explains, was to find patterns in the data. A group of people who share segments on the same chromosome probably share a common ancestor. If Plebuch could find a group of relatives who all shared the same segment, she might be able to use that along with their family trees, family surnames, and ancestors' home towns in the old country to trace a path into her father's biological family.

And yet, the crack in the case came not through Plebuch's squad of helpful DNA cousins, but through a stranger with no genetic connection.

As administrator of Pete Nolan's 23andMe account, she had permission to check the list of his DNA relatives yet rarely did so, since new relatives rarely showed up. But one day in early 2015, she decided to check it. A stranger had just had her saliva processed, and she showed up as a close relative of Nolan.

Plebuch emailed the woman and asked whether 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 whether 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 that her grandfather, Phillip Benson, might have been born around that date.

She started combing through her list of baby names from the 1913 New York City Birth Index. No Benson born that day in the Bronx. But then, well after midnight, she found it: 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.

This was 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.

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DNA, persistence reveal family shocker - Fort Wayne Journal Gazette