Two Canadian seniors were born 67 years ago in the same small rural hospital in Arborg, Manitoba, and those babies left the maternity ward with different families, their paths seemingly destined to never cross again. Now, Richard Beauvais, a commercial fisherman in British Columbia, and Eddy Ambrose, a retired upholsterer in Manitoba, know each other well—because they found out not long ago they'd been switched at birth. The New York Times has their story, whose twists started to unravel when Beauvais took a DNA test two years ago at the request of his daughter, who wanted to know more about the family's Indigenous background. The test, oddly, didn't point to any Indigenous or French roots, but to "a mix of Ukrainian, Ashkenazi Jewish, and Polish ancestry," per the Times.
Beauvais shrugged it off as an error—until Ambrose took his own DNA test and was "shattered" to find out that he wasn't genetically tied to the Ukrainian-Canadian family he'd grown up in. The two men connected through the testing website and concluded they'd been swapped soon after birth. Ambrose says his upbringing was a happy one, in a "loving family," though now he feels guilty that Beauvais didn't have that same experience—his dad died when he was 3, after which he lived in poverty until he was placed in foster care at age 8 or 9. "It makes me feel I've been robbed of my identity," Ambrose says. "My whole past is gone." Now, the men wish they'd never found out the truth. "We both agreed that if we opened that up and nobody else knew about it, we would have just shut the book and we wouldn't have told anybody," Beauvais says. "Just let our life go." More on their story here, as they now question "who they really are and [learn] how racial heritage shapes identities." (More switched at birth stories.)
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