Woman’s DNA test reveals shocking family mystery.
Like all new technologies, DNA testing has a good side, a bad side, and as author Margaret Atwood said, a stupid side you hadn’t considered eight years ago. 72-year-old Washington native Alice Collins Plebeach made a decision that would change her life forever. She sent samples of her saliva for a just-for-fun DNA test. Seeing as both of her parents were devout Irish-American Catholics, Alice thought she had a good idea about what the DNA test results would say. But when the results came back, Alice was shocked.
She wasn’t who she thought she was. This revelation sent Alice and her siblings on a years-long journey to uncover the mystery surrounding their identities. Questions about her family had preoccupied Alice for years. Her mother, who was named Alice, was into genealogy. She kept an old family book with the handwritten names and births and deaths of their relatives. Alice found her mother’s side easy to follow, even before genealogy records were available online.
Woman Searches for Father’s Ancestral History in Midst of DNA Test Controversy
Her mother was Irish on one side and Scottish and English on the other. Some of her relatives had even been in America as far back as colonial times, and Alice was able to trace some of her mother’s ancestors back to the 1500s. But with each update to her mother’s lineage, Alice felt guilty because her father’s side of the family was a different story.”My dad had nothing.
He had no history,” she told journalist and author Libby Copeland. Her father, Jim Collins, was the son of Irish immigrants. He knew little of his family history. His mother had passed away when Jim was just a baby, and his father was unable to care for him and his older siblings, so he gave them away to a Catholic orphanage. For most of his life, Jim didn’t know what year he was born in, believing he was a year older than he really was. As her father grew older, Alice decided it was time to dive into his lineage and discover where he came from.
Alice uncovers details of father’s childhood and family history through research.
Before she began the project, she had already known some of the details of his childhood. She knew that living in the orphanage had been hard. Alice knew that her father had most likely been malnourished while living there because a doctor later told him that this most likely explained his small build. She also knew that he had left the orphanage in his teens and was a rebel before he joined the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and married his mother.
She also knew that her father had a sister who had died when she was younger and a brother he was not close with. Jim was also a devout Catholic who cooked a wicked corned beef on Saint Patty’s Day. But what Alice didn’t know was where he came from and what happened to his parents. When her father died in 1999, Alice couldn’t really tell him more than he already knew. In the years that followed, however, Alice was able to find some sort of paper trail. Jim was born in a working-class neighborhood in the Bronx, New York.
Woman uncovers father’s childhood in orphanage through research and letters.
His father, Joseph, worked as a driver, and his mother, Katie, passed away at the age of 32 when Jim was only 9 years old. She also found the name of the orphanage where he grew up. It was the Saint Agnes Home and School, and although the school was no longer around, she was able to find the names of some of the sisters who worked there. Alice wrote them a letter asking if they had any helpful information about her father. Besides Jim’s admission and discharge dates, the orphanage
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