A few years ago, Alice Collins Plebuch decided to take one of those DNA tests which show your ancestry. She had always believed herself to be of Irish descent and her family fully identified as Irish-American Catholics, so she was disturbed and flummoxed when half of her DNA came back as being European Jewish, Middle Eastern and Eastern European. (
read here).
And so, Alice began a journey to find out the real story of one-half of her origins.
As it turned out, to make a long story short, Alice's father Jim Collins, who had always been very religious and regarded himself as being an Irish-American, and who'd even had a Irish-style wake when he died, had been mistakenly given after his birth, to the Irish-American couple that he grew up to regard as his parents. His real parents were actually Ashkenazi Jewish-Americans. The Irish couple's own child had been given to the Jewish family and this child had been named, Phillip Benson.
Phillip Benson, like Alice's father, was born at Fordham Hospital in the Bronx and he had been brought up
and married into the Jewish community. Someone it seems, mixed the children up and as the
Washington Post stated, “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 Philip Benson had instead
become Jim Collins.”
Which just goes to show how most of us simply take on
and adsorb the beliefs of our immediate family and surrounding culture, despite the origins of our DNA.
