After This Woman Sent Her DNA To Be Tested, She Uncovered An Ominous Crack In Her Family History

Plebuch was excited when an email from Ancestry.com pinged into her inbox in the summer of 2012. The resident of Vancouver, Washington, had sent away saliva in a DNA testing kit only a few weeks earlier – curious to find out about her heritage. It was all a bit of fun and driven purely by Plebuch’s long fascination with the science behind DNA.

After reading the email, though, Plebuch was left confused. Surely Ancestry’s findings couldn’t be correct? According to The Washington Post, half of her DNA results showed a “mixed British Isles bloodline.” And this made sense – her parents were both of Irish Catholic heritage, after all. But the other half of the results threw up a truly bizarre combination of heritages that she hadn’t expected.

Plebuch was apparently convinced that there had been some sort of error, so she wrote Ancestry a letter of complaint. The retiree reasoned that maybe some kinks just needed to be worked out in the company’s system. After all, this was still the nascent days of internet consumer DNA testing. When Plebuch got the same results from a different company, though, it would begin a journey that changed everything the woman thought she knew about her family.

At this time in 2017, Plebuch was 69 years old and had retired from her work as an IT manager at the University of California. Both parents had passed away, and she was intrigued to find out more about her father Jim Collins’ side of the family. Plebuch knew all about her mother’s side – which included various cousins and siblings – but Collins’ clan were more of a mystery.

Plebuch knew that Collins came from an Irish immigrant family but grew up in an orphanage. You see, his father John was a longshoreman who became unable to raise his three children, so he made the tough decision to send them away. John died while Collins was a child, and this meant that the latter ended up having minimal contact with his wider family.

As he grew up a lonely boy in an orphanage, being Irish took on extreme importance for Collins. As Plebuch told The Washington Post in 2017, “He didn’t have anything else. He had his Irish identity.” In fact, her father was given an Irish wake after he passed and one of his daughters sang a poignant rendition of “Danny Boy.” 

Knowing how vital his Irish identity was to her father, Plebuch simply could not comprehend the results she’d received from Ancestry. As per The Washington Post, it indicated that 50 percent of her genetic makeup was Middle Eastern, Eastern European and European Jewish. The implication, as hard as it was to accept, was that one of her parents had a background she’d never known about.

Jim was the obvious candidate for investigation, so Plebuch set out to do just that. And her skills as an IT manager were quickly put to good use. She told the newspaper, “I did data processing most of my life, and at a fairly sophisticated level.” Plebuch bet on herself to find connections in the unwieldy streams of DNA data she would soon begin receiving.

The first port of call for Prebuch was to organize a second DNA test – this time with 23andMe. The retiree even convinced her sister Gerry Collins Wiggins to get tested too, and she then found out their brother Bill had taken one independently of his sisters. Interestingly, all three tests came back with the same unusual traces of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.

The idea of their mother – or even grandmother – having had an affair crossed Plebuch’s mind. It seemed unlikely, and the siblings all agreed they shared their father’s hooded eyelids, but the thought needed to be addressed. Luckily, the tests wound up proving they were all full siblings. So, there was, as Plebuch told The Washington Post, “No hanky panky” in their parentage.

These findings also ruled out the possibility that Plebuch had been adopted and simply never told that by her parents. If she wasn’t adopted, then, and her mother never had an affair, it meant that one of her parents was Jewish. And an email from a retired professor Plebuch reached out to solidified this. He reportedly stated, “What you are is 50 percent Jewish. This is in fact as solid as DNA gets…”

Could Collins’ parents have secretly been Jewish – but never informed him? Or, when the family first entered America, did they pretend to be Irish for the benefit of immigration? Her sense of identity already shaken, Plebuch asked her sister what she made of the situation. According to The Washington Post, Wiggins replied, “It is the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning, and the last thing I think about as I drift off to sleep.” 

Plebuch then had another brainwave. If she got one of her parents’ nephews from either side of the family to also take tests, it would prove once and for all that the mystery was on her dad’s side. These results soon confirmed that her mom’s relative was indeed Plebuch’s full first cousin. But Jim Collins’ nephew Pete Nolan? His results opened up a whole new can of worms!

Incredibly, Nolan’s DNA results showed he had no genetic connection to Plebuch at all! This meant that Nolan’s mother – Collins’ sister – was not genetically related to Collins either. In DNA terms, Nolan and his mom were total strangers to Plebuch and her father. Naturally, everyone was stunned.

Plebuch then panicked because she didn’t want this bombshell to affect the relationship with Nolan. She told The Washington Post, “I was afraid he was going to reject me because we were no longer biological cousins.” Still, she plucked up the courage to phone Nolan, who admitted he was sad but put her mind at ease by saying she was the best cousin he’d ever had.

By this point, Plebuch knew the scenario in which her grandparents were secretly Jews and had never told their son was not true. The DNA was pointing to Jim being Jewish – but his mom and dad having Irish-American heritage. In essence, her father wasn’t actually related to his own parents. And this revelation pushed Plebuch even further away from everything she’d ever known.

“I really lost all my identity,” Plebuch told The Washington Post. “I felt adrift. I didn’t know who I was – you know, who I really was.” Amazingly, though, the retiree didn’t let these feelings stop her in her tracks. If anything, she was more determined than ever to track down some of her father’s relatives. After all, maybe Jim had real siblings out there in the world, which would mean Plebuch having more cousins. 

In 2013 Plebuch then managed to get her father’s birth certificate. Apparently, he’d come into the world at the Bronx’s Fordham Hospital on September 23, 1913. Perplexingly, Plebuch also discovered that Collins was sent to the orphanage as a young child by the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

Was Collins confused with another child when he was taken away from his father? Well, this was something that Plebuch considered. So, she found a photograph of her dad at 11 months old – sitting on his grandfather’s lap. The retiree then asked a forensic artist to determine if this baby definitely grew up to become Jim Collins. 

What was the artist’s conclusion, though? Well, he explained that, when comparing this picture to the adult Collins, the mouth, ears and chin were the same, and the facial proportions all seemed in line. It seemed probable that this baby was indeed her father. Plebuch would later find out she was on the right track by questioning whether a mix-up had happened at the orphanage – she was just looking at the wrong institution.

Plebuch then set about trying to identify potential members of her father’s side of the family. This involved contacting people whose test results suggested they may be “DNA cousins” on her Jewish side. After 23AndMe told Plebuch of any potential matches, it would be up to her to contact that person and request a look at their genomes.

This became Plebuch’s full-time occupation, according to The Washington Post, as she wound up contacting over 1,000 people. Some totally ignored her requests, but others were intrigued by her story and wanted to help. Eventually, though, the data simply became unmanageable. The number apparently ballooned to an incredible 6,912 potential DNA relatives!

At this point, another family member with a uniquely perfect set of skills stepped in. Plebuch’s brother Jim – a former NASA computer systems engineer – created an app for all the data. He named it “DNAMatch,” and it replaced the simple spreadsheets Plebuch had been using before. Clearly, the family just kept proving it was determined to eventually find the truth. 

For two and a half years Plebuch’s investigation went along this path. It was like trying to find the proverbial needle in a DNA haystack – slow, repetitive work with seemingly little chance of finding anything. But in January 2015 there was finally a break in the case, and it came from a completely unexpected source.

The new lead apparently came thanks to a North Carolina woman named Jessica Benson, who’d had her saliva tested. The woman aimed to find out about her Jewish heritage, and she wound up listed as a relative of Plebuch’s “cousin” Nolan. Even though the latter had been proven to not be a blood relative, Plebuch was still intrigued by this new match. So, the retiree contacted Benson and asked if she was surprised to be linked to Nolan.

“I was actually expecting to be much more Ashkenazi than I am,” Benson told The Washington Post. Instead, she had discovered her heritage was Irish and was shocked by the revelation. In essence, she was experiencing the exact opposite scenario to Plebuch. Sensing that there may be something to this, Plebuch asked if anyone in Benson’s family had been born on September 23, 1913 – the date Jim Collins was born.

Benson’s next words would be the key to unraveling the entire mystery. The former told Plebuch that she believed her grandfather Phillip Benson had been born around that time. The retiree then began pouring over the New York City Birth Index from 1913. Plebuch was convinced she would find a “Benson” born in Fordham Hospital on the same day as her father. 

Apparently, there was no “Benson,” but Plebuch did find a “Philip Bamson” born on this date in that very hospital. And suddenly everything clicked into place. Someone had made an error with mis-recording Benson’s name on his birth certificate, and an even bigger mistake must have been made in the hospital. Yes, two babies were mixed up and sent home with the wrong families.

Amazingly, this theory soon became a plausible explanation for the whole perplexing situation. Plebuch was increasingly certain that her father – a Jewish child born to the Bensons – had been sent home with the Irish Collins family. In turn, Benson’s Irish newborn grandfather had gone home with the Jewish Benson family. 

The theory was leant even more credence when Plebuch and Benson compared the birth certificates of their grandparents. The processing numbers were only one apart – 10941 and 10942 – and both featured the signature of the same doctor. Then, when Plebuch researched how hospitals in that era catalogued new-borns, it became obvious how such a mistake could have been made.

Plebuch found a photograph that turned her stomach within the pages of Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950. It had been taken in a hospital in Manhattan in 1912 and showed 12 babies clumped up on top of one another on a cart. In all honesty, the system at the time was almost asking for reform.

Retired professor and childbirth historian Judith Walzer Leavitt told The Washington Post that she uses the photograph in her lectures, and it always gets a shocked gasp from the audience. The expert added, “You can understand how possible it was to switch babies inadvertently.” Incredibly, she also noted that it didn’t become standard practice to link mothers to their babies with identifying bracelets until the 1930s or ’40s.

But Plebuch and Pam Benson – Jessica’s aunt and Phillip’s daughter – didn’t want to let the incredible revelations derail their lives. So, they sought to unite the two families. In January 2017 Plebuch and several members of her family went on a cruise with Pam and Phylis Pullman: the daughter of Jim’s real biological sister. Plebuch and her first cousin Pullman looked so alike that they could have been mistaken for sisters!

While the two families did get along extremely well, the implications of what happened still sometimes troubled them. Like Collins, Phillip Benson also died long before the families found out the truth about their origins. On occasion, it would move the younger Benson to tears when she wondered what her father – a Jew who wasn’t raised that way – would have thought of everything.

On the other hand, Plebuch actually considered it a blessing that her father had never found out the truth. The elder man loved being Irish, so she believes that her dad would have lost his identity upon learning that he was actually born Jewish. As time passed, the larger question of whether someone is defined by how they were born would continue to play on Plebuch’s mind.

And something else would trouble Plebuch, too. After she saw a photograph of Phillip Benson as a child happily riding a horse, she couldn’t help feeling envious on her father’s behalf. Was this the childhood her dad should have had? Phillip’s family life was stable: he had two parents and a full high school education. By contrast, Jim grew up in an orphanage – cut off from his parents who both died young. 

Yet if Plebuch looked at the situation from another angle, it put things into a whole new perspective. If it hadn’t been for a mistake made by overworked staff at a Bronx hospital, she would never have been brought into the world. Clearly, this was a lot to take in.

This soul searching eventually led Plebuch and her family to decide that they weren’t going to hold onto any bitterness. The retiree did not regret discovering the truth about her father’s birth, even though it fundamentally altered the family Plebuch thought she knew. If given the chance for a do-over, the woman told The Irish Times in 2017, “There’s no question about it, yes, I would do it again.”

As an ironic postscript, the revelation shone a curious spotlight on an aspect of Plebuch’s youth. The former IT manager told Radio New Zealand in 2017 that both she and her sister’s first boyfriends were Jewish, and it caused consternation for their mother. Why? Well, she didn’t want her daughters to marry a Jew. Plebuch laughed, “I always think that’s the irony of it – she was the one who married someone who was Jewish.”