Kimberley Hunt, top left, and
the family she grew up with.COURTESYOFKIMBERLEY^ HUNTKimberley Hunt, 53
Found her biological siblings and cousinsI
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 diag-
nosed with uterine cancer. It spreadquickly, 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 aneur-
ysm at age 49. When he was inducted
into the Newfoundland and Labrador
Hockey Hall of Fame in 2014, his daugh-
ter, 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 Febru-
ary 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.
I wrote to Cheyanna, who sent
me Cheryl’s phone number. “She’s
waiting for your call,” she said. I
phoned her that day, and we
talked for hours. We discussed
what we liked to cook and our
taste in music. We gushed about
how happy we were to have foundreader’s digest