Found: Family

With the help of DNA kits, these four Canadians tracked down lost relatives—or ones they never knew existed

- Christina Gonzales

Kimberley Hunt, 53

Found her biological siblings and cousins

I grew up black in an all-white family in Corner Brook, N.L. My mom was white and she had six children with her first husband, who died in 1964. Two years after he died, she gave birth to me. My mom never told anyone who my dad was—not her sisters, not her kids, no one. But you could count on one hand the number of Black men who lived in Corner Brook in the ’60s, which limited the pool of candidates considerably. Many people suspected my dad was Clobie Collins, a hockey player who grew up in Nova Scotia and played in the Newfoundland senior hockey league.

When I was two, my mom was diagnosed with uterine cancer. It spread quickly, and she sent me to live with my older sister Catherine in Toronto. I was four when my mom died, and Catherine raised me. I always felt like an outsider in my family because I looked different. In my 30s, I googled Clobie Collins and noticed how much we looked alike. I learned he’d died of a brain aneurysm at age 49. When he was inducted into the Newfoundland and Labrador Hockey Hall of Fame in 2014, his daughter, Cheryl, attended on his behalf. I figured she had to be my sister—we looked almost like twins. But I thought there was no way to prove it. I believed the secret had died with my mother.

In 2017, Catherine gave me a DNA kit for Christmas—we’d always wanted to know who my dad was. It comes with a plastic vial that you spit into, and then you send the kit back and wait for the results to be uploaded into AncestryDNA’s system. In February 2018, I received a notification from Ancestry saying they’d found matches in my family tree. Two of them, Cheyanna and Tya Collins, lived in Montreal; they were descended from Clobie’s sisters. That confirmed it: he was my father.