Matthew’s family used to joke that his father had brown eyes and black hair while his grandparents had penetrating blue eyes. “Dad did not seem at all to them,” this British told the BBC, who now knows why: his father was exchanged at birth almost 80 years ago. He died last year, the septuagenarian never knew the truth about his origins.
Matthew approached the BBC after discovering that a fellow citizen was compensated by the NHS (the United Kingdom Public Health System) after having discovered thanks to a recreational DNA test that had been exchanged at birth in the 1950s.
“I understood immediately”
During the Covid pandemic, this man also requested a recreational DNA test to learn more about his origins. Then he discovers that he is linked to a lot of people whose existence does not know. “It seemed strange to me, I called my wife to tell him that the old family joke was perhaps a certain after all,” Matthew said at the British Radio Station.
Then he asked his father to send a DNA sample in turn, which makes it possible to detect that the latter is even more linked to this group of perfect strangers. The man begins an exchange with two women considered by the Genealogy website as cousins of his father, who do not understand where this relationship can come from.
They ended up consulting the birth records of the city dating from 1946, a few months after the end of World War II, and realized that another baby with the same last name (a relatively rare name) as Matthew’s father was recorded the day after his birth in the same hospital in eastern London.
“I immediately understood what had to happen,” Matthew said today. “The only logical explanation is that the two babies had been exchanged in the hospital.”
“My father didn’t need to learn this”
At that time, few babies were born in the hospital. But when this was the case, the newborns were placed as a nursery away from their mother and the midwives took care of them. To identify them, a leaf was joined to the crib that indicates the name of the baby, that of the mother, the date and time of birth and weight. The nominative bracelets were not yet in their place.
Which could lead to labeling errors, which were still rare but resurfaced today thanks to the boom in recreational DNA tests. “I love to solve puzzles and understand the past,” says Matthew. “I am quite obsessive in nature, so I started completely in this reconstruction.”
His father, who died at the end of last year, will never know the truth about his origins. Matthew doubted extensively to reveal the truth about his family history, but finally decided not to do it. “I told myself that my father did not need to learn this. I had experienced 78 years in a form of ignorance, and that did not seem fair to impose this.”
According to Matthew, this insurer who exercised in London was an amateur cyclist and very involved in local breeds, according to Matthew. He had lived only since his retirement and his health had deteriorated in the last ten years.
* The first name has been changed, the family that wanted to remain in anonymity.
Source: BFM TV
