Professional Weirdo Podcast

Where I research strange stories and tell them to you. Because, let’s face it, I’m gonna research this anyway and blurt it to someone, might as well be a willing audience. Some of these stories might get dark, morbid, murdery…. so listener discretion is advised.

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Professional Weirdo Podcast

Episode 3 - 23andWho?

March 31, 2025 • Anonymous Narrator • Season 1 • Episode 3

This week I said goodbye to 23andMe and removed my data from their database. When I took the test 4 years ago I only had one slight surprise in my results. But there are a lot of other people out there who had much bigger surprises in store.

Music recommendation for this episode:

Strangers by Portishead
What I Am by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians

To find these and more recommended songs for this podcast, check out the Spotify Professional Weird playlist

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5jIkaamOZlCwtd2peUk9lF?si=0238d524a374492d

Sources for this episode:

Sound mixing performed by Brother Jay from The Rule of Scary podcast - check that out if you’re a horror movie fan! And hey! Thank you for listening to my stories. Keep it weird out there.

To find song recommendations for this podcast, check out the Spotify Professional Weird playlist

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5jIkaamOZlCwtd2peUk9lF?si=0238d524a374492d

Email me at professionalweirdopodcast@gmail.com

Hello again. How have you been? Busy week on this end, and among all my to do list items I suddenly had to fit in removing my data from 23 and Me. It was announced that they were going bankrupt, and given that data is big business nowadays, the worry is customer data could be a prime asset for fulfilling their debt. I received my 23 and me kit as a Christmas present in 2020 and eagerly awaited what information it would share about my lineage. Storytelling had been a cherished past time in one side of my family, so through handed down stories I knew there were roots in Switzerland and Germany. The other side of the family was, well, uh, a little wild, so those stories were usually about bar fights and accidentally setting a neighbor’s lawn on fire. And that one time when a great-uncle’s criminal charges were read on the Bob & Tom radio show. But not much about our lineage, so 23andme filled in that gap, showing a lot of English and Irish DNA. With a dash of…. Neanderthal. Yep, at some point there was a homo sapien and Neanderthal romance in the family. 23 and Me explained that some variant traits I might have that come from my Neanderthal DNA was a poor sense of direction, which is true, that’s a problem for me. Also, being more attractive to mosquitos, which is sadly very true. And not sneezing after eating dark chocolate - which is untrue. We’ve had a lot of laughs in the family about our Neanderthal blood. It was the only surprise that came from sending my DNA sample to 23 and me. But there are a lot of other people out there who had much bigger surprises in store.

This is our third episode - 23 and who?

Welcome weirdos, to the Professional Weirdo podcast, where I research strange stories and tell them to you. Because, let’s face it, I’m gonna research this anyway and blurt it to someone, might as well be a willing audience. Some of these stories might get dark, morbid, murdery…. so listener discretion is advised.

For the last 4 years I would occasionally get a notification from my 23andme app letting me know someone related to me had submitted their DNA. The notification would proclaim “You have new relatives!” I would jump into the app to see where these new people landed on the family tree and geographically. Some names I knew, some I didn’t. To my surprise, there were 3rd, 4th, and 5th cousins popping up in the same city where I live. Could I be related to the DoorDash driver? Or my dentist? Had I ever unknowingly worked with someone who shared great great great great grandparents with me? Today’s episode will be rated 1-5 new relatives!

23andme stopped tracking how many of their customers had results that were unexpected, but in 2014 when they were tracking, it was 7000. 7000 people finding that the person who raised them wasn’t a biological parent. Or that they had a sibling they didn’t know existed. What does exist today is a page on their website dedicated to providing some support for those finding themselves in that situation. It reads “Navigating Unexpected Relationships” and it includes a crisis text line to use if needed. Farther down the page it shows - and links to - the stories of some of their users who got unexpected results. One of these stories belongs to Kayla Milligan who grew up as an only child wishing for siblings, and after sending in her DNA she found her wish had been abundantly granted. The first surprise was that her parents had used a donor service after struggling to conceive. The donor father had been a graduate college student who had donated to multiple donor banks, not expecting how often his “donation” would be utilized. Kayla’s 2nd surprise was that her 23andme results were reporting that she had 20 half-siblings. The 3rd surprise came after connecting with these half-siblings and finding out that there were more of them outside of the 23andme network. Kayla had, to date, 77 half-brothers and half-sisters. Many of them met in person in Nashville, discovering not just shared physical traits, but shared mannerisms and expressions. Despite the surprises, Kayla feels it’s a positive outcome and values the relationships she has with her new siblings. Well, kinda starting off breaking the scale here, but I have to say it… this story rates 77 new relatives out of 5.

While the donor father in that last story had not intended to father so many children, there’s a story you might have seen on Netflix called “Our Father” that shows how dark that can get when there’s true, negative intention behind it. I’ll give you the quick version and if you are still interested (and not just completely repelled by what this creep did), I recommend you go watch the documentary. It tells the story of a fertility specialist named Donald Cline who intentionally used his own donation to impregnate his patients. In some cases these women thought their husbands were the donors. In other cases, they thought it was an anonymous donor. In zero cases did they know, or consent, to their doctor being the donor. It all came to light with the at-home DNA tests. The primary woman interviewed is Jacoba Ballard, who had the shock of multiple siblings when her results came back. But there were just 7 then, and as they were piecing together how this was possible and starting to link it back to their mothers’ fertility doctor, the nightmare just grew. More and more siblings were uploading results, and Jacoba had to take on the unfortunate role of reaching out to them with support and an explanation as to why their results were showing so many siblings and the number continued to climb. Are you wondering why a doctor would do such a thing? He of course dodges responsibility and at one point calls Jacoba to whine and ask that she stop talking to people about this because it would really hurt his reputation if it got out. He’s definitely not forthcoming about what he did or why but the best guess is his connection to an extremist Christian sect called “Quiverfull” - don’t know how I said that without gagging. They lean hard into the ol’ “be fruitful and multiply” and bonus points if it produces children with blond hair and blue eyes. Yep, that ol’ tale. There aren’t laws in place around what this man did, because, I’m guessing, normal people with normal brains couldn’t have predicted it. He’s not really been punished in the legal system for what he’s done, yet, but the cases continue to come in. But you know what he did get? A very popular documentary streaming into homes telling eeeeeverybody with a Netflix subscription what he did. And a Wikipedia page telling people what he did. And a google search result that puts his mug shot front and center. Thanks, internet! 1/5 new relatives, because - Quiverfull. EW!

Alice Collins PLAY-buke Plebuch and the other 6 Collins siblings knew quite a bit about their family history - both parents were Irish Catholic. Her mom came from a big family that they knew well. Their dad Jim was born in the Bronx. His parents had come to the United States from Ireland. Once in the states, his father was a longshoreman. His mother died when Jim was a baby and, being unable to care for Jim and his two siblings, Jim’s father had to send them to orphanages. As an adult, Jim was able to keep contact with some of his family. He joined the Army and traveled all over the world, and having so little family experience as a child, he celebrated and devoted himself to his own wife and children. When he passed awake, they held an Irish wake. Even thought Alice was already well informed about her Irish bloodline, she wanted to see if there was more she could discover about her father’s ancestry. With both of her parents having passed away, and paired with her interested in science, she took at DNA test through ancestry.com. What came back in her results was not as she expected. There were the ties to her Irish bloodline, but the report indicated that one of her parents was Jewish, specifically ash-kah-naz-ee Ashkenazi, a distinct sub-group of the Jewish population. Nothing in the family history hinted at how this could be. She took another test through 23andme and it reported the same results. So the first assumption was a secret affair in the generations before her. Eventually all of Alice’s siblings took at DNA test to see if the results would be the same. The result showed they were full siblings, all being half Jewish, indicating there wasn’t a secret love child among them. Alice’s career happened to have been largely in data processing, so she was ready to take on this puzzle. The next step was having a cousin from her mother’s side, and a cousin from her father’s side take the tests to see which side of their family had the shared Jewish bloodline.

Suspecting that maybe her father’s parents who immigrated from Ireland had perhaps been secret Irish Jews, they were expecting their cousin on their father’s side - the son of their father’s sister - would have results showing the Jewish DNA. But before the results were back, Alice realized she already had the answer in her brother’s results. You see, for women, an X chromosome can come from either parent, so there was no way to know which of her parents had contributed the Jewish ancestry to was showing up there. But men inherit only one X and it’s always from their mother. They get the Y chromosome from their father. And for Alice’s brother, no Jewish heritage showed up along his X chromosome, meaning their mother did not have Jewish ancestry.

But there was still a surprise in the results from their cousin on their father’s side. The report indicated that they were not, in fact, genetically related to this person. Meaning their father Jim and his sister had not actually been related, nor was Jim biologically related to either of his parents. So now the question was - who was Jim? This mystery had just gotten bigger. But I’m telling you, Alice was determined to solve it. While taking a class in DNA research and combing the DNA sites for other first cousins, she wondered if her father’s identify had been accidentally switched at the orphanage. She had his birth certificate showing the date and place he was born, and had found in the records what orphanage he had been sent to. She also had a photo of what was believed to have been her father as a baby, sitting with his father and siblings before it had been necessary to send them to orphanages. She took the photo, and one of her father as an adult, to a forensic artist to determine if the baby in the photo was the same person who had raised her. The forensic artist’s answer was yes - ears, mouth, chin, and facial proportions indicated the baby in the photo was Jim Collins. So if there was a switch, it happened before the orphanage. Alice looked to the hospital where Jim had been born. Meanwhile she kept an eye on the results coming into the DNA sites to see if anyone with shared Jewish DNA might upload their results. To determine if these new entries were related to Jim close enough to help solve the mystery, it required Alice to reach out to the person and asked to see the person’s genome. This would show if they had chromosomes that overlapped. But despite sending at least 1000 requests, they weren’t finding anyone closely related enough to help solve the mystery. I find it ironic that during this search, at least virtually, Alice was connecting with these distant cousins in far larger numbers, and with connections much deeper into the generations, than any family reunion. Essentially building a vast family that was willing to help. One suggested that the baby Jim Collins might have been switched with a baby under the last name Cohen - a common Jewish surname. Diving into the New York City Birth Index of 1913, a baby was found named Seymour Cohen. That vast family of distant DNA cousins that Alice had assembled were on the case and were able to find a descendant of Seymour’s sister, who was willing to take a DNA test to see if there was a connection to the Irish cousins on her dad’s side and that might prove the switch. But there wasn’t a match. Back to looking at the names of babies, and just to give you an idea of the effort involved here - the index for children born in the Bronx at the same time as Jim was 159 pages long. And this was no sortable spreadsheet. It was not ordered by date and didn’t list what babies were born at home or in the hospital. She trimmed down to a list of 30 babies who were male and born the day of, before, and after her father was born. Alice cross-referenced those with the names of people who had matched in the DNA sites as distant relatives. Nope. Back to crunching the numbers across all the genetic data they were pulling out of the DNA sites, which came down to only 311,467 potential clues. Between you and me, I probably would have given up at this point. Would I have been haunted by the unresolved mystery? Yes. Would I have lost sleep over it. Yes. Would I have blurted my family history mystery to friends, coworkers, person I’m buying a coffee from? For sure. Would I have stress-eaten too much pasta about it. Absolutely. But not those Collins kids. I didn’t read their DNA results, but I can tell you there was plenty of grit in there somewhere. To help manage the data, Alice’s brother Jim, who had worked on NASA supercomputers before retirement, designed an app called DNAMatch. For 2 and a half years they waited, searching, and watching for any new results. But then it happened - remember the cousin who turned out not to be related? Another test had been processed and he had a new relative. Alice contacted the woman and found out that the results were not what this woman was expecting. She had been hoping to learn more about her Jewish heritage, in particular, her ash-kah-naz-ee Ashkenazi background. Because she’d grown up in a Jewish family. She went on to write that she was surprised to discover from these results that she was actually Irish. As it turns out, this woman’s grandfather, Phillip Benson, had been born in the same hospital, around the same date, as Jim Collins. After comparing the birth certificates it was discovered that the same doctor signed them and the certificates were one number apart. So at some point two baby boys were next to each other, having been placed there with one name, but departing with the other. For anyone wondering - how is this possible? Well, the identification bracelets weren’t in use yet. And how could a mother not recognize that a baby bundled and handed to her wasn’t the one she delivered? Well, drugs! The practice back then for pain management was to put laboring mothers in something called “twilight sleep,” often with morphine. The women weren’t totally unconscious, but out enough to not bother anyone with inconvenient crying, or anything so unladylike as loud groaning. Or, you know, visible…. What’s it called? Oh yeah - laboring! And speaking of labor, what an effort by Alice and her siblings to solve the 100 year old puzzle that was cracked open by her doing an at-home DNA test - for fun! 5/5 new relatives!

Now this wasn’t discovered through 23andme, but here’s a DNA result that did spill some family secrets. King Tutankhamen had a short, but clearly celebrated life. Ruling from the age of 9 to 19 when he died, his time ruling Egypt, and his tomb, are famous. A lot of discoveries were made when examining his remains - he had a broken leg, he had a club foot, he had a cleft palate, and a curved spine, and issues with his immune system, and - revealed through DNA testing - his parents were siblings. This was common in royal families, but it was due to this practice that he had many of these physical deformities. While they would have made life difficult, it wasn’t exactly what killed him. Finding evidence of parasites in the DNA testing, Howard Markel, a professor of the history of medicine at the University of Michigan said - again - a PROFESSOR said this, to NPR - “He also had a raging case of malaria.” I don’t know how often King Tut comes up in conversation for anyone, but please feel free to quote that when it does. 3/5 new, or, same, relatives. Father but uncle plus mother but aunt - is that 4 new relatives, or 2 - I don’t know how to do this math.

That’s all, folks! I hope you enjoyed today’s stories. If you are having trouble shaking off that whole “Quiverfull” thing, I recommend listening to Steve Martin’s song “King Tut” and you’ll be right as rain. If you’d like to support this podcast, rate and subscribe and tell your friends. You can also follow me on Instagram under “professionalweirdopodcast”. And you can email me at professionalweirdopodcast@gmail.com

Speaking of music, there’s that Professional Weirdo podcast music playlist on Spotify. Songs I recommend with today’s episode can be found on the playlist. This episode’s songs are Strangers by Portishead and What I Am by Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians. I’ll list these, along with the link to the playlist, in the show notes.

That’s a wrap! Sources used for this episode can be found in episode notes. Sound mixing performed by Brother Jay from The Rule of Scary podcast - check that out if you’re a horror movie fan! And hey! - thank you for listening to my stories. Keep it weird out there.