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 hello wonderful people i’m jamie buck from wonderbot and here is the dark side of dna tests woman uncovers century-old family mystery before we begin make sure you smash the like button subscribe to our channel and click the notification bell for more amazing videos [Music] 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 her mother was irish on one side and scottish in 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 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 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 in school and although the school was no longer around she was able to find the names of some of the sisters who work 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 couldn’t provide alice with any other helpful information

years passed and alice’s research came up fruitless then in 2012 at home dna kits became available alice was elated she had just discovered what she thought was her father’s family’s village in ireland and she was considering a trip overseas to see where her grandparents had come from alice knew that an at-home dna test would make her research a whole lot easier so she put her name down on the company’s waiting list when the tests finally arrived she and her sister jerry swabbed their cheeks and sent in their tests and when the results came

back a month later alice and jerry were more than a little confused only less than 50 percent of the sister’s dna results were of irish scottish and english descent the other half of her dna was an unexpected combination of european jewish eastern european and middle eastern this was odd alice thought because both of her parents were from the british isles surely someone at the testing lab had messed up her results or accidentally switched them with someone else’s alice wrote the testing company a letter explaining

their mistake she decided to take the test again but when the same test came back for a second time alice knew that the report was correct several questions popped up in her head who were her parents did her mother have an affair alice was determined to get to the bottom of whatever family secrets had been kept from her if her parents weren’t who they said they were that meant that alice by extension wasn’t who she thought she was the dna test results were only the beginning as they provided alice with the what but not the why

while intense research and analysis might intimidate some people alice was not thrown off she had worked as an i.t manager at the university of california before she retired i did data processing most of my life and at a fairly sophisticated level she said in 2017 alice likes to find patterns in chaos and answer big questions with complex answers after getting over her initial shock alice got straight to work maybe her mother had an affair or her grandmother but this scenario seemed unlikely cheating was out of character

for alice’s mother and all of alice’s siblings shared her father’s eyes still the question lingered in the back of her mind my father he was in the army and he was all over the world and it was just one of those fears that you have when you just don’t know alice told author libby copeland alice and her sister had a gut feeling that the lineage came from her father’s side especially since he was adopted were her father’s grandparents secretly irish jews or maybe eastern european jews who said they were irish when they

immigrated to america as a precaution alice had two of her cousins one on each side take a dna test the results from her maternal cousin came back normal the two shared 12.5 percent of the same dna meaning that they were first cousins but the test results from her paternal cousin were peculiar the test showed that alice and her cousin whose mother was jim collins sister shared no dna in other words the two were complete strangers genetically speaking and weren’t actually cousins this also meant that alice’s father’s sister wasn’t

actually his sister alice was frustrated with the results to say the least not only was she back to square one but she was scared of being rejected from her dad’s side of the family since they weren’t biologically related with the data results in front of them alice and her sister jerry came to the conclusion that their father jim was not related to his parents i really lost all my identity alice said in 2017 i felt adrift i didn’t know who i was you know who i really was but for her jerry the test results confirmed a feeling she had

for a very long time for years jerry had thought that jim’s father bore no resemblance to anyone in her immediate family and when she traveled to ireland in the 90s she realized that no one looked like her five foot four dark-haired father jerry carried this feeling around with her for years but with the dna test results in front of her her hunch turned to fact with her father and her parents long dead alice and jerry knew they had to unravel their father’s mystery by speaking with the living did her father have any

biological siblings did those siblings have any children was there any chance alice and her siblings had long lost first cousins by 2013 the collins children were finally getting closer to solving their father’s mystery they had their father’s birth certificate and had also learned that jim had been sent to an orphanage by the new york society for the prevention of cruelty to children maybe alice wondered her dad had somehow been confused with another child when he was taken from his home maybe the orphanage mixed up her father

and another baby going on this hunch alice sent a forensic artist pictures of her father sitting on his father’s lap when he was just a year old along with photos of jim when he was an adult alice wanted to know if the people in the photos were the same people but again this line of thinking was a dead end the forensic artist ruled that it was in fact the same person meaning that the orphanage hadn’t confused her father with another baby so alice began thinking of a different idea maybe she thought her father was switched at the

hospital was there a chance that the hospital had made a mistake alice decided to take a closer look at all the babies who were born in the same hospital as her father in 1913 but this was no easy task not only was the list of children who were born in the bronx in 1913 159 pages long but it also was not ordered by date nor did it differentiate between home and hospital births after carefully scanning through the file alice was able to narrow the list down to the names of children born around the same time as her father that

sounded either jewish or ethically neutral alice’s list totaled 30 babies her hope was that one of those babies on the list had living relatives who shared the same dna as alice and her siblings alice went through all 30 baby names but again nothing came up alice then combed through more than 6 000 people who were tagged as potential biological family members according to the dna’s online database she searched for two and a half years but couldn’t find a match alice began to lose hope all she could do at this point in time was to wait for

someone to reach out to her then on january 18 2015 alice’s life changed forever it was a sunday morning and she was particularly down she decided to write to her cousin whom she wasn’t biologically related to to update him on her stalled search after sending her cousin an email alice randomly decided to check his list of dna relatives on his genealogy account this was something that alice rarely did especially since new relatives rarely showed up but on this day alice decided to check and this time there was a new person a stranger

had sent in her dna sample and her results showed that she was a close relative to alice’s cousin alice then decided to message the stranger to ask if the test results were what she expected i was actually expecting to be much more ashkenazi than i am the woman wrote the stranger whose name was jessica benson took a test on a whim hoping to learn a bit about her jewish roots instead jessica said she discovered that i’m actually irish which i had not expected at all alice felt chills she wrote back to jessica that

her grandmother was born at fordham hospital on september 23 1913 anyone in jessica’s family been born around that date jessica quickly replied yes her grandfather philip benson was born around that time alice began to cry she had a feeling that she knew what had happened but first she needed proof so she combed through new york city’s birth records from 1913.

 there was no benson born on that day in the bronx but a few hours later alice finally found what she was looking for there was a phillip bamson born on the same day and at the same hospital as her father jim this had to be philip benson alice knew in her bones what had happened to her father there was no family mystery buried by shame someone at the fordham hospital had made a mistake that day a mistake that could only be uncovered with new technology somehow a jewish baby had been sent home with an irish family and an irish baby with a jewish

family the women were stunned they compared the birth certificates and discovered that jim and philip were processed one after the other and signed by the same doctor allison then began to research how hospitals used to keep track of newborn babies and what she found shocked her alice found that hospitals didn’t really have a system at all most of the newborn babies were kept in the same cart making it very easy to switch a baby accidentally when jim was born in 1913 hospital births were still unusual and most hospitals had yet to come up with a

way to identify babies some hospitals kept newborns in a crib next to their mother’s hospital beds but others kept newborns in nurseries while it’s hard to know for sure the type of practices that were in place at fordham hospital because it was closed in 1976 it’s safe to assume the latter it wasn’t until the late 30s that hospitals gave mothers and their newborns identifying bracelets in 1913 nurses typically relied on the nurse’s memory or the mother’s recognition of her newborn after the truth was revealed the benson and

collins families exchanged pictures which made everything clear jim collins looked much more like phillips five foot four father and four foot nine mother then six foot phillip did my grandfather came to my dad’s shoulders philip’s daughter pam benson said the collins sisters also had their own explanation about why their father wasn’t as tall as his siblings they always just assumed that jim had been malnourished while growing up in the orphanage after all that is what the doctor told them never in a million

years did alice think that her father wasn’t biologically related to his brother and sister it’s a mystery that only dna technology could have uncovered alice soon discovered that she had a biological first cousin named phyllis pullman who was the daughter of the sister jim never knew he had in 2015 alice decided to fly to florida to meet her sitting on opposite sides of the couch the two women could have been mistaken for sisters they definitely shared the same dna phyllis shared a story about when her tall uncle philip

was dating his first wife her observant jewish parents didn’t believe that he was jewish he had to bring his birth certificate phyllis told author libby copeland little did we know it wasn’t his birth certificate the two families have kept in touch over the years but neither of them can shake the what-if questions that linger in the back of their minds on the one hand the two families are happy that they found each other but on the other hand the revelations feel like a loss how could alice and pam come to terms with the

facts that their fathers weren’t who they thought they were and then there were the questions about religion was jim collins jewish because he was born that way or irish because he was raised that way and what does that mean for his daughter alice alice and his sister agreed that if their father was still alive it would have been the right thing to tell him but they consider it a blessing that jim wasn’t alive during the era of at-home dna testing my dad would have lost his identity alice said he’s been kind of spared that

alice and her siblings also think about what would have happened if her father had gone home to his biological family as the bensons and collins families exchanged photos alice felt a sting of jealousy jim wasn’t supposed to end up in an orphanage alice wondered what kind of life her father would have had had he been raised by the bensons his biological family well for starters alice thought jim would have been raised in a solid home he would have graduated high school and definitely done something with his gift

for mathematics instead jim dropped out of high school served in the army and later worked as a california prison guard at the end of the day jim made a decent life for himself but alice and her family can’t help but grieve for their father as a child in the orphanage my father got an orange for christmas alice said yet had the switch not happened in 1913 than alice and her siblings would not have been born the collins children owe their life to a simple mistake with complex consequences made by a nurse’s lapse in attention it was a terrible

mistake but how can alice resent what happened and yet were it not for what happened in 1913 alice collins pla book would not exist the collins children owe their lives to administrative oversight or a nurse’s momentary lapse of attention you

Alice Collins would return to that thought again and again in the years after the discovery, not as a question she expected to answer, but as a place her mind seemed to rest when everything else became too complicated. The idea that a single unnoticed moment in a hospital more than a century earlier could ripple forward through time and shape entire lives was both unsettling and, in a strange way, grounding. It reduced everything to something almost mechanical. A nurse distracted. Two infants placed side by side. A name written on the wrong line. And from that point forward, two completely different stories unfolding, each one lived fully, each one believed completely by the people inside it.

In the months after Alice connected with Jessica Benson and confirmed what had happened, the conversations between the two families took on a rhythm that felt at once natural and entirely unfamiliar. They exchanged photographs first, cautiously, the way people do when they are not yet sure what they are looking for but know that they will recognize it when they see it. Alice laid out pictures of her father Jim across her dining table in Washington, images from different decades of his life, a young man in uniform, a middle-aged man in work clothes, an older man with the slightly stooped posture she remembered from her childhood. When she placed next to them the photographs Jessica had sent of her grandfather Philip Benson, the resemblance did not require explanation. It was immediate and undeniable, not just in the shape of the face or the set of the eyes, but in something less tangible, a shared expression that seemed to exist beneath the surface of the photographs themselves.

It was in that moment, more than in the DNA results or the birth records, that the reality of the switch settled into something that could not be argued with. Jim Collins had not resembled the Collins family because he had never been a Collins by blood. Philip Benson had not quite fit within the Benson family because he had carried a different inheritance entirely. The lives they had lived were real, but the origins of those lives had been misplaced at the very beginning.

Alice’s siblings reacted in different ways, each according to their own temperament and their own relationship to their father’s memory. Jerry approached it analytically at first, as she had approached the DNA results, treating the discovery as a problem that had finally been solved after years of uncertainty. There was satisfaction in that, a sense of completion. But even for her, that satisfaction did not last long. It gave way to something quieter and more difficult to name, a kind of disorientation that surfaced in unexpected moments. She would find herself looking at old family photographs and realizing that the story she had always attached to them was no longer entirely accurate, that the context had shifted in a way that could not be reversed.

Another of Alice’s siblings reacted with resistance, not to the facts themselves, which were clear, but to the implications. He had built his sense of identity around the Collins name, around the Irish Catholic heritage they had been raised to understand as their own. The idea that this heritage was not biological felt, to him, like a kind of erasure, even though nothing about his lived experience had changed. He continued to attend the same church, to celebrate the same holidays, to cook the same meals their father had cooked. And yet, beneath these continuities, there was a subtle shift, a question that had not existed before and now could not be entirely ignored.

Alice herself moved between these responses, sometimes within the same day. There were moments when she felt a kind of intellectual fascination with the entire situation, an appreciation for the complexity of it, the way it intersected with history, medicine, and identity. And then there were moments when the weight of it pressed more heavily, when she thought about her father as a child in the orphanage and felt a sharp, specific grief for what he had lost without ever knowing it.

She thought often about the life he might have lived if the switch had not happened. It was an impossible line of thinking, one that could not lead anywhere concrete, but it persisted nonetheless. In the Benson family, from what she had learned, there had been stability, structure, a kind of support that Jim had never experienced in his early years. He might have stayed in school. He might have pursued the aptitude for mathematics that Alice remembered him demonstrating in small, practical ways throughout his life. He might have become something entirely different from the man he had been.

But then, just as quickly, the thought would turn, because that alternative life would not have included Alice or her siblings. The existence of her entire branch of the family depended on the exact sequence of events that had occurred, including the mistake. To imagine correcting that mistake was to imagine undoing herself, and that was not something the mind could fully accommodate.

The meetings between the Collins and Benson families continued over the next few years, sometimes in person, sometimes through phone calls and letters. They were not dramatic reunions in the way such stories are often portrayed. There were no sudden emotional declarations, no immediate sense of becoming a single unified family. Instead, there was a gradual process of getting to know one another, of finding small points of connection and allowing those connections to grow at their own pace.

When Alice visited Phyllis Pullman in Florida, the meeting was quiet, almost understated. They sat in a living room that looked like many living rooms Alice had been in before, with framed photographs on the walls and a coffee table covered in magazines. They talked about their lives, about their parents, about the discovery that had brought them together. At one point, there was a pause in the conversation, and they simply looked at each other, both aware of the resemblance that had been noted by others and that they could now see for themselves.

“You have my mother’s eyes,” Phyllis said finally.

Alice smiled, not because it was surprising, but because it was the kind of observation that made the entire situation feel more real than any document or test result could. It was something immediate and visible, something that existed in the present rather than in the past.

For Jessica Benson, the discovery had its own set of implications, different in detail but similar in structure. She had taken the DNA test expecting to confirm a heritage she already understood, to add detail to a story that was already in place. Instead, she found herself confronted with a version of her family history that required revision at its most fundamental level. Her grandfather Philip, whom she had known as a certain kind of man with a certain kind of background, was now understood in a different context entirely.

There were questions in her family as well, about identity, about religion, about what it meant to belong to a tradition that had been passed down through generations. These questions did not have simple answers, and over time, the need for simple answers diminished. What remained was a more nuanced understanding, one that allowed for multiple truths to exist at the same time.

Philip Benson had been raised in a Jewish family, had lived his life within that tradition, had passed it on to his children. That was real and could not be undone. At the same time, his biological origins were Irish Catholic, a fact that added another layer to his identity without negating the life he had actually lived. The two things existed side by side, not in opposition, but in a kind of coexistence that required a shift in perspective rather than a definitive conclusion.

As the years passed, the intensity of the discovery softened, not because it became less significant, but because it became integrated into the larger narrative of both families. It was no longer a disruption but a part of the story, something that had shaped the past and continued to inform the present without overwhelming it.

Alice continued her genealogical work, though her focus changed. She was no longer trying to fill in a missing branch of her father’s family tree. That branch had been found, though it had come from an unexpected direction. Instead, she became interested in the broader patterns, in the ways individual lives intersect with larger historical forces, in the ways small events can have consequences that extend far beyond their immediate context.

She spoke occasionally about her experience, not as a cautionary tale, though there were elements of that, but as an example of the complexity of identity in an age where technology can reveal information that was previously inaccessible. She understood, perhaps more clearly than most, that knowledge does not always simplify things. Sometimes it does the opposite, adding layers where there had previously been a single surface.

There were moments, still, when the emotional weight of it returned unexpectedly. A photograph, a memory, a passing comment could bring it back with a clarity that felt almost immediate. But these moments became less frequent over time, and when they did occur, they were held within a broader understanding that allowed them to exist without overwhelming everything else.

In the end, what remained most significant was not the mistake itself, though it was extraordinary in its consequences, but the lives that had been built in its wake. Jim Collins had lived a life that was shaped by circumstances he had not chosen, but within those circumstances, he had made decisions, formed relationships, created a family. Those things were real and enduring, independent of the biological details that had been uncovered decades later.

Alice came to see it that way, not as a contradiction, but as a kind of balance. The past had been altered by the discovery, but the meaning of her father’s life had not been diminished by it. If anything, it had become more complex, more layered, more reflective of the unpredictable nature of human experience.

And sometimes, when she thought about it in the quiet moments, she would return to that image of the hospital in 1913, not with anger or resentment, but with a kind of distant curiosity. Two infants, side by side, indistinguishable to the people responsible for them. A moment of inattention. A decision made without awareness of its significance. And from that moment, two lives diverging, carrying forward into a future that neither the nurse nor the families involved could have imagined.

It was, in the end, a story not just about a mistake, but about everything that came after it.