A woman in her 90s has discovered that the son she raised was not her biological child, after an Ancestry DNA test revealed the baby she brought home from hospital in 1951 was switched at birth. Joan, from Weymouth, had long suspected something was wrong when she gave birth in the West Midlands, but kept her worries to herself for decades.
In 2018, her daughter Sue bought Ancestry kits for Joan and her brother Doug. The results confirmed that William, the eldest son, was not genetically related to any of them. 'DNA doesn't lie,' Ancestry told Sue. The family had always felt William seemed different, and Joan recalled a strange incident at the hospital after his birth.
The discovery has sparked a quest to find Joan's biological son, now in his 70s. The family has spent thousands of pounds on the search. Cases of accidental baby swaps are rare in the UK, but a similar case from 1967 in the West Midlands recently led to an NHS admission of liability and compensation.
Other cases have emerged globally, including in Norway and Spain, where DNA tests revealed switches decades ago. In the UK, near misses have been reported, such as a 1953 incident where a baby was handed to the wrong mother and breastfed before the error was noticed. The NHS says modern tagging and separation practices have eliminated such risks.
