Who was she?....

[Mosby]

Five years ago, Alice Collins Plebuch made a decision that would alter her future — or really, her past.

She sent away for a “just-for-fun DNA test.” When the tube arrived, she spit and spit until she filled it up to the line, and then sent it off in the mail. She wanted to know what she was made of.

Plebuch, now 69, already had a rough idea of what she would find. Her parents, both deceased, were Irish American Catholics who raised her and her six siblings with church Sundays and ethnic pride. But Plebuch, who had a long-standing interest in science and DNA, wanted to know more about her dad’s side of the family. The son of Irish immigrants, Jim Collins had been raised in an orphanage from a young age, and his extended family tree was murky.

After a few weeks during which her saliva was analyzed, she got an email in the summer of 2012 with a link to her results. The report was confounding.

About half of Plebuch’s DNA results presented the mixed British Isles bloodline she expected. The other half picked up an unexpected combination of European Jewish, Middle Eastern and Eastern European. Surely someone in the lab had messed up. It was the early days of direct-to-consumer DNA testing, and Ancestry.com’s test was new. She wrote the company a nasty letter informing them they’d made a mistake.

But she talked to her sister, and they agreed she should test again. If the information Plebuch was seeing on her computer screen was correct, it posed a fundamental mystery about her very identity. It meant one of her parents wasn’t who he or she was supposed to be — and, by extension, neither was she.

Eventually, Plebuch would write to Ancestry again. You guys were right, she’d say. I was wrong.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/lifestyle/she-thought-she-was-irish-until-a-dna-test-opened-a-100-year-old-mystery/

[GeoWilliam750]

1. Wonderful story

[marybourg]

2. Absolutely fascinating.

[pansypoo53219]

3. adopotions do screw things up. grandma had native american teeth, but we have no native blood.

do need a test. my cousin did not do a good test. AND what about that lincoln rumor....

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

4. What, pray tell, are native american teeth?

I live in a part of the country where I see many Native Americans, and I've never noticed anything different about their teeth.

[MosheFeingold]

6. I am sitting here with two Apache guides

In Mescalero, NM.

And they say some tribes have distinct indention on the front of their front teeth like shovels.

"Shovel Tooth" is apparently a slang term used for these other tribes.

Not an Apache thing, they tell me. Up north.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

8. Thank you.

I'm likewise in New Mexico. I wonder just how closely you have to look to notice that. Again, I've never particularly tuned into anything that different about Native American teeth.

And a quick look at that topic on Wikipedia shows that "shovel teeth" also show up in Caucasian population. Not very often, but still there.

[EllieBC]

5. Fascinating story! Has there been a halachic ruling on proving Jewishness via DNA?

I feel like this will be an issue soon as the Israeli rabbinate keeps shifting to the right. An increasing number of non-Orthodox won't have an Orthodox ketubah to pass down to their children and grandchildren as proof of their lines.

[MosheFeingold]

7. There is re: Cohen

Line. It can be used as confirmation, but you still use ketuba, et al because you cannot tell if someone along the male line married a non-Jew or a Jew-by-choice (which is prohibited for Cohenim).