Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
Sweet Home resident Anita Collins was living a settled life in retirement a year and a half ago when she decided to buy a gift for her husband Bob: an Ancestry.com DNA analysis kit.
Things went awry quickly.
“I’m not very technical,” Collins said. “I didn’t notice that the website had a checkbox for ‘gift.’”
When the kit arrived, it had her name on it, not her husband’s. When she complained, the company said it was too late to change it. She was stuck with it.
“I wasn’t interested in my DNA,” Collins said. “I thought I was what I was – half Italian, half Irish.”
She stuck the box in a corner and forgot about it for three or four months.
Finally, she said, “I decided, ‘This is a waste of money. I’ll just spit in the vial and I’ll probably find out that my dad is not my dad.’ I said it very flippantly.”
When the results came back, “I opened my DNA and I’m like, ‘I don’t understand this. Where is the Italian and what does this half-Jewish mean?’”
Collins, 67, was born in Buffalo, N.Y., the oldest of four children in her family – two sisters and a “baby brother” 13 years years younger. Her family left Buffalo when she was 3 and she grew up in North Hollywood, Calif. She worked at the Simi Valley Police Department in the 1970s before moving to Sweet Home with Bob and their four kids.
As far as she knew, there were few, if any, wrinkles in her story.
One small question that had percolated in the back of her mind for years was her mother’s wedding dress when she married Collins’ dad, who was in the service at the time. Her parents had not been well-off, but the photo of their wedding in 1949 showed her mother wearing a “beautiful” dress.
“I asked my mom how in the world she had such a beautiful wedding dress. She said, ‘My boss, Max Gross, bought me the dress and walked me down the aisle.’”
Gross owned knitting and hat factories in Buffalo at the time, Collins said.
The ancestry.com report showed a whole branch of her family tree that contained cousins with strange names – and a father named Max Gross, two sisters and a brother.
Collins did some research and discovered that Gross was a married man with three other, much older, children.
“I’m the baby in that family,” she said. Her sister Marilyn is 95 and Iris is 88. Both live in Florida. Their brother Harvey, 92, still lives in Buffalo.
“I was not planning on contacting these people at all,” Collins said. “I thought at that age, ‘Oh, my word, I’m not going to interrupt their lives. I was fine with not doing that.”
She did, however, connect with one of her new cousins and word got around. Eventually, she did get in contact with her older sister, Marilyn.
“She and I spoke some – not very often, over the course of three or four months.”
Meanwhile, she and a friend, Sue Stauffer, decided to cash in on some free airline miles Collins had and take a trip to the Sunshine State. They had an itinerary planned, but Collins got the idea to check to see how far away she’d be from her sisters.
“Before we left on our trip, about a week before, I looked up to see where they lived,” she said. Turned out, they were located about an hour away from Miami, where they were scheduled to arrive and depart.
She did get together, for dinner, with Marilyn and Iris.
“They were living independently and they were very vivacious, sweet people,” Collins said. “There were a lot of tears. They told me I looked like Dad, more so than the other siblings.”
Though the visit was brief, she said it was affirming.
She said her own kids, despite being told all their lives that they were half-Italian – “We grew up Italian – food, that kind of thing,” took the news well. “They were fine with it.”
Collins said she hadn’t had “a real good relationship” with the dad she’d had growing up “and this has answered a lot of questions for me.”
She’s learned a lot about Gross, her real father.
In Key West, after meeting her sisters, she ran into two older men from Buffalo, who, when she told them she was from there and some details of her story, told her that they knew of her father.
“The guy said, ‘You’re Max Gross’s daughter?’ They told me my dad was a wonderful guy who was involved in the community and government, ‘a politician, a philanthropist and a super great guy.’”