After This Woman Sent Her DNA To Be Tested, She Uncovered An Ominous Crack In Her Family History
What would you do if you received information suggesting everything you thought you knew about your family history was wrong? Would you pursue the line of inquiry – no matter where it took you? Or would you bury your head in the sand? This is exactly the dilemma which was faced by Alice Collins Plebuch. Yep, unexpected DNA test results threw the woman down a rabbit hole that went all the way back to her father’s birth.
Ancestry.com
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.
A confusing result
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.
A journey that changed everything she knew
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.
The mystery of Jim Collins’ 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.
