When Sue bought her mother and younger brother Ancestry kits for Christmas in 2018, she knew that they were never going to be fun gifts. A lingering doubt had always cast a shadow over their family, a question that had gnawed at them for decades. Sue hoped that, if she, Joan and Doug took DNA tests together, they might finally have the answer they craved.
Their results came in a few weeks later. Ancestry listed Sue and Doug as full siblings, with Joan as their mother. Their father, Tom, had died in 2016. Sue felt certain that William – her parents’ first child, the older brother she and Doug had grown up with, a man they hadn’t seen for years – had already taken a DNA test with Ancestry. But he didn’t appear anywhere on their genetic family tree.
“We could see we were all as we should be, and he was nowhere,” Sue explains in the living room of Joan’s home in Weymouth. “Then I rang Ancestry, and said he hadn’t pulled through as a match. They just said: ‘Very sorry for your results, but DNA doesn’t lie.’”
The news that William was not biologically related to any of them didn’t come as a shock to Sue, Joan or Doug. “It felt like confirmation of what we’d always known,” Sue tells me. William had always seemed so different from the rest of the family. And something strange had happened at the hospital after he was born, something that had always played on Joan’s mind, even though for years she kept her worries to herself.
The DNA results turned out to be only the beginning of a quest for answers that would come to consume their family. Joan had given birth to a son in the West Midlands in April 1951. If William wasn’t that baby, then who was? The question has become an obsession that has taken over Sue’s life, and cost Joan thousands of pounds.
Cases where babies have been accidentally switched at birth are supposed to be unheard of in the UK. In response to a 2017 Freedom of Information request, the NHS replied that there were no records of babies being accidentally brought home from hospital by the wrong set of parents in recent years. But I have discovered that, at a time before babies were routinely tagged with wristbands and were kept apart from their mothers in creches overnight, mistakes happened – with unimaginable consequences.
Last November, I reported on the story of two women who discovered they had been accidentally switched at birth in a West Midlands hospital in 1967 – all due to an Ancestry DNA test, received as a Christmas gift and casually taken on a rainy day in 2022.
It was devastating news for both families, and the two women had to question everything they thought they knew about their heritage and identity. The NHS has admitted liability in this case, and agreed to pay compensation – although, three years on, the final sum is still yet to be agreed. The NHS trust told the families it was the first documented case of its kind in the history of the health service.
Since November, my inbox has been filled with stories of other accidental baby swaps, recently discovered through people taking at-home DNA tests out of idle curiosity. A Norwegian lawyer got in touch with news of her client, Mona, who had taken a MyHeritage DNA test in 2021, only to discover that she had been switched at birth in 1965; she was fighting for compensation from the Norwegian government after it was revealed that her birth mother had known about the mistake for decades but had been discouraged from looking for Mona. Another case, in Barcelona in 1972, had also recently come to light because of someone taking a MyHeritage test. The Spanish government has agreed to pay compensation in what will be the third case of its kind in the country.
Several people have sent me stories about near misses in the UK. A man described how he had been handed to the wrong woman a few hours after his birth in 1953; he was already being breastfed by the time his mother realised the mistake. A woman who had worked for Hampshire social services in the 1990s pointed me towards a case where two babies were taken home from a Southampton hospital by the wrong sets of parents in November 1992 and spent two weeks with the wrong families. One of the mothers had had suspicions, but the other had been convinced she had the right baby until DNA testing confirmed the mixup.
All of which is to say that accidental baby swaps are more common than any of us previously imagined. But Sue, Doug and Joan’s case is different from all of these stories. Joan had always secretly suspected she had been given the wrong baby more than 70 years ago, and while the Ancestry test appeared to confirm this, the DNA results have not yet been able to tell her who the right baby was. With Joan now in her mid-90s, Sue feels she is in a race against time to find the biological son her mother never even got to hold.
It only takes a few moments in Joan, Doug and Sue’s company to sense that they share DNA: they echo each other, in their faces and mannerisms. Joan is ensconced in a reclining chair in her living room, surrounded by pictures of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and stacks of novels. She can’t move around the way she used to, but her mind is as sharp as ever. The family moved from Warwickshire to Dorset 50 years ago when Joan’s husband, Tom, decided to set up a greengrocer’s shop in a seaside town where they used to take holidays. Tom died almost nine years ago; Joan’s wedding ring remains on her finger. Doug moved in with his mother four years ago, and he and Sue are her carers. Sue lives a few minutes’ drive away.
Joan describes herself as being “a young, young 21” when she went to the West Midlands hospital to give birth to her first child. Married the previous year, she and Tom were living with her parents on the Warwickshire farm where her father raised pigs and cows. Joan’s waters broke late on a Sunday night. Tom was nervous when he rang the hospital. “I said: ‘Don’t panic, we’ll be all right,’” she tells me. “He ran all the way down the drive in front of the ambulance to open the field gate. He waved to me. I thought, you should be coming with me.” In the 1950s, men stayed away when women gave birth. “I imagined him shutting the gate after the ambulance. And we went on our way.”
The baby arrived at about two in the morning. “They said: ‘It’s a boy.’ And I thought, Tom will be pleased.” Tom had grown up with five sisters, and had been desperate for a son. “I said: ‘Oh, that’s my baby, then. That’s lovely.’ And I was holding my hands out ready to cuddle him, and they took him away.”
She extends her arms, as if still reaching for the newborn who was taken from her. “I didn’t have the chance to cuddle him. I never held him. It’s a terrible feeling. And even after all these years, you feel it’s not right.” Her eyes brim with tears. “You just followed instructions, and that’s how it was.” Her son was washed and taken to the creche for the rest of the night, which was routine practice in those days. Joan went to sleep.
A few hours later, the ward sister came into the room Joan shared with three other mothers, carrying four babies in her arms. Joan remembers it vividly – because of what happened next. The sister appeared to lose her grasp on one of the newborns as she approached Joan’s bed. “I thought, gracious, she’s going to drop one,” Joan remembers. “This baby slipped out of her hands and dropped on my legs, and it cried out. If she hadn’t have come quickly to me, she would have dropped him on the floor. I grabbed the baby and pulled him to me, because he was crying.”
The sister told Joan to feed the baby, and then continued to distribute the other three. “I just kept looking at him and thinking, I wonder if you’re my baby?” Joan says. But, exhausted after the birth and unwilling to challenge a nurse, Joan kept quiet once again. And then Tom came to the hospital, full of excitement that he had a baby boy. She felt she couldn’t say anything.
The nagging doubts continued when Joan returned home from hospital. She did what she knew she was supposed to do – bathing the baby in a bowl of warm water on the kitchen table, dressing him in the clothes she had knitted for him – but things never felt right. “I didn’t have that motherly feeling.” Many new mothers feel that way, of course. “It was my first baby, and I was getting used to it, so I just ignored that and got on with it.” But the unease lingered. “It was almost like a feeling of: one day they’ll bring me the right baby.”
Determined never to give birth in hospital again, Joan had Sue and Doug at home. As her three children grew up, the youngest two were always close, but William liked to keep to himself. “I thought, if I’ve got a family, it has to be a family. But he seemed different from the other two,” Joan says. She pauses. “He was totally, totally different.”
Joan is choosing her words carefully. William has been estranged from the family he grew up in for nearly 20 years; their relationship had been very fraught, and Joan is anxious about speaking about him. He did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article. William is not his real name.
As the years passed, Tom expressed bewilderment about how their first child could be so different from the rest of the family; it was as if they were growing different seeds in the same soil. Joan told him about how William had fallen into her lap at the hospital where he was born. “Tom said: ‘I think we brought the wrong one home.’ He made up his mind it was the wrong one. Something wasn’t right.”
Sue says she never had any idea that either of her parents questioned whether William was their biological son. “We had brilliant parents. All of our family – a huge family, on both sides – everybody was lovely,” she says. “We were always brought up to be very close to each other, but where it came naturally to Doug and I, it didn’t come naturally to the older one.”
“Cousins and friends would comment, saying: ‘Oh, he’s not like you,’” Doug adds. “There’s always been something distant.”
Despite their differences, Sue tried to maintain a relationship with William, visiting him when he was at university, sometimes staying over. “But it was hard work.” As she became an adult, she started to ask questions. “We didn’t look alike. Doug and I do: we’ve got the same sort of features, and the older we’ve got, the more you can see which bits are like which parent. But he just didn’t look like either of them.”
When Sue was 19 or 20, Joan finally told her about what had happened at the hospital. It made sense to her. So did the DNA results. When she broke the news to old friends and the wider family, it didn’t come as a surprise, she says. “Nobody’s shocked.”
Ancestry had been selling kits in the UK since 2015, but Sue had chosen to wait until she had retired and had the time and headspace to process whatever a test might reveal. William had been into genealogy for years, Sue tells me: he had had an Ancestry profile since before the company sold test kits. She knew he would have taken a DNA test once they came on the market.
And when their results came in, in early 2019, William sent Joan a text, out of the blue, asking whether they had done Ancestry tests; a cousin had been in touch trying to work out why Sue had appeared as a genetic match to him, but William had not. Joan confirmed that they’d tested. “Sue’s not a match,” William replied. “You’re not my mother.” It was the last contact any of them have had with William.
Joan was devastated. William was still the son she’d raised, after all. “When he said: ‘You’re not my mother,’ it went through me,” she tells me, her fists clenched across her chest. “I thought, so he’s not mine. It pulls you apart. It’s a dreadful thing: a child is not yours.”
How soon did she start thinking about who her biological son could be? “Straight away.”
“I got heavily into it then,” Sue tells me. “You get on to Ancestry and start searching for somebody … I think, I’ll just do an hour tonight. Five hours later, I’m thinking, you’ve got to get to sleep. This has been going on ever since I took the test.” It has dominated her thoughts for the past six years.
DNA results can take over people’s lives. Sue is not the first to get lost trying to find someone after a revelation reframes a family. There are scores of Facebook groups run by genealogists – sometimes called “Search Angels” or “DNA Detectives” – who offer to decode DNA results or track down missing people, often for nothing, but sometimes for a fee. An entire industry has sprung up of companies that offer similar services.
At first, Sue did her own detective work. There were no unexpected connections in her Ancestry results that could reveal who this missing brother might be. But Sue’s Ancestry subscription allowed her to access birth records, so she immediately downloaded the names of all the people whose births were registered in the relevant area in spring 1951. She deleted the girls, and put the 130 remaining possible candidates on a spreadsheet, colour-coding the ones that looked most promising. “A work of art,” she says proudly.
Next, Sue scoured the internet for any possible clue about exactly when the men on her spreadsheet were born, and whether it could be at the hospital where they believe the swap took place. “I found one guy on Facebook. I was thinking, he doesn’t look like us. I went through looking where everybody had said ‘Happy Birthday’ to get the date. And he flippin’ died the day after I found him,” she says, ruefully. She began to search death records, too, marking down those on her spreadsheet who were no longer alive in a different colour.
She wrote to the hospital, asking for any information about who was born at the same time as Joan gave birth, but the hospital told her they couldn’t help. (In a statement, the managing director of the hospital NHS Trust involved said: “While we sympathise with [Joan], NHS organisations are legally required to destroy birth registers after 25 years. The Trust has complied with this requirement and there are no records at the hospital NHS Trust to be able to assist with this matter.”) Then, Sue contacted the General Register Office (GRO), which said it did have records of babies born at the hospital around the time Joan gave birth, but it would not release them without a court order. “There’s 33 different kinds of court orders,” Sue sighs. “You’ve got to pay a solicitor to deal with it all. I wouldn’t know where to start.”
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She turns to a neat stack of pale papers, at least an inch thick. These are the birth certificates she has ordered so far, at huge expense. She got them from Ancestry at first, at £25 each, until she realised she could order them for £12.50 if she went direct to the GRO. “I’ve probably got about 60 or 65 more to get,” she tells me. She’s getting them in batches of 10, because that’s all Joan’s budget allows. “Doug and I aren’t in a position to be paying for it, and Mum’s got limited funds – she’s living off a pension.” This is all on top of Sue’s Ancestry subscription, which costs her £13.99 a month. She’s been subscribing for the past six years.
And this is only the beginning of their spending. Joan has always known the last name of the woman who was in the bed next to her at the hospital in 1951 – it was the same as her own maiden name. They hired a people-tracing firm, Relative Connections, to track down the son that woman gave birth to. The company managed to find him, and passed on Joan’s offer to pay for him to take a DNA test that would rule him in or out of their family, but he refused. In the end, his daughter and niece both agreed to take Ancestry tests, at Joan’s expense. “It turned out they were first cousins, and neither of them pulled through as a match to us. So we knew it wasn’t him,” Sue explains. Crossing his name off the spreadsheet had cost Joan another £1,147. This has left two possible candidates: the men who, as babies, were given to the women in the two beds opposite Joan.
Their hopes are now pinned on another man whose date and place of birth match up. Relative Connections made contact with him a few months ago, Sue says. The company has spoken to him on the phone, and passed on a letter from her, Joan and Doug, explaining how much it would mean to them if he took the test. They followed up the letter with emails and voicemails. But he has neither agreed to take the DNA test nor refused.
“I am 99.9% sure he was one of the babies the nurse was carrying. Whether he’s the one that should have been with Mum, we won’t know unless he does a DNA test,” Sue says, frustration rising in her voice. They’ve even offered to pay for him to have a more expensive test with a private lab, in case he’s wary of being on Ancestry’s database: he’d give his DNA, Joan would give hers, they’d get the results within 24 hours, and it would remain between the two of them. But there has been no response from him since the initial phone call.
Sue gets out her phone again, this time to show me the picture she’s taken from this man’s Facebook and placed next to pictures of her family for easy comparison.
“He looks like Doug. Dad’s shape face. The nose looks like Mum’s.”
“He’s got a big nose like me!” Joan chips in.
I look over to Doug, and he does look quite a bit like this stranger from Facebook. But then Sue shows me another picture of the same man, this time with the woman he thinks is his mother, and I think they look alike.
“That is supposed to be his older brother,” Sue continues, pulling up another photo. “Now, I think he looks like …” and she brings up a picture of William. “He has got the ears the same as that guy, who’s supposed to be the older brother to that one.” You could lose your mind, scrutinising faces like this.
Sue found Relative Connections on Google. “When I spoke to them on the phone, they were very good, and said they do it for television programmes as well. I thought, we’ve got to find him. But obviously, we have to give them another £1,000 to find this one who hasn’t agreed to test yet. I’m very conscious that it’s Mum’s money.”
Why not just contact him directly, instead of using an intermediary? “I know his address. I could have done it myself,” Sue concedes. “I didn’t want him to think that some crazy stalkers had come after him. I wanted him to feel that it wasn’t just some crackpot – this genuinely happened.”
“This isn’t a TV show where everyone’s happy to have contact and everyone sits in a lovely tea shop having scones together,” says Sue Harrison, Sue’s contact at Relative Connections. “That’s not reality. There are variable outcomes and they’re not always going to be what you want.”
Harrison is telling me about the importance of expectation management in her line of work. Her background is in customer service – she had no experience of people-tracing before she started at Relative Connections a decade ago. Her goal, she says, is to bring her clients closure.
There are a huge range of reasons why people hire her: sometimes they are looking for a beneficiary named in a will, or old school friends, or people they met on holiday. “One of our most popular searches is for old sweethearts.” Family estrangements keep them busy, with parents looking for grownup kids, and vice versa.
Now that one in 20 British people has taken a DNA test, and more than 26 million Americans, an important new dimension has been added to their business. Harrison has come to understand the amount of shared DNA that makes a sibling, a parent or a cousin. They have a dedicated team member who specialises in decoding results from Ancestry, 23andMe and MyHeritage.
I’ve called Harrison because I want to understand the value professional services such as hers could bring to families like Joan’s. What do they do that their customers can’t on their own?
“Most people come to us after years of trying to find a person themselves,” Harrison says. “You would think that with social media it would be easier now than it was years ago, but it’s actually harder.” These days, we have the option of choosing not to be on the public electoral register, and fewer of us have landlines; there’s no reliable phone book to look people up in any more. Relative Connections has access to paid databases that aren’t in the public domain, Harrison says, with verified addresses. But the real value they bring, she continues, comes from taking on the role of intermediary: “Having someone who’s a step back, who’s not related, who’s not emotionally involved with either side.”
It’s not uncommon for people to believe they have been switched at birth, Harrison tells me; for some, that is less far-fetched than the idea that they share DNA with the family that raised them. But Joan’s story stands out as the first case the company has handled where there’s every reason to believe a baby swap has actually taken place.
“The human inside of me is incredibly frustrated,” she says. “I don’t want Joan to leave this Earth not knowing what happened.” The man Sue has identified as very likely to be one of the babies given to a mother opposite Joan in April 1951 seemed friendly and amenable on the one occasion when Harrison spoke to him on the phone, she tells me. He verified that he was born on the right date, and at the same hospital. “I’m at the point where I have to assume at this stage he’s choosing not to get back in touch,” she says.
They will send a final letter, and if that goes ignored, Harrison says she will ask his daughter to take a DNA test. “Had he contacted us and said: ‘I don’t want to know at my time of life,’ then I probably wouldn’t have agreed to contacting the daughter. But he hasn’t, and I don’t know why. I have to balance that between what Joan and Sue need. Time is running out.”
Sue is painfully aware that had William’s attitude been different, they could have quickly found the answers they sought by looking through their genetic family trees together. “If we find who should have been with us, he’s going to find where he should have been.”
Beyond the text to Joan saying she wasn’t his mother, William has never discussed his DNA results with the family he grew up with. Joan’s memories of the hospital, and the differences between the siblings, mean Joan, Doug and Sue are all convinced the switch must have happened. And Joan has invested too much in the search to give up now.
Now in his late 60s, Doug doesn’t really care about finding his older brother. “For me, personally, it doesn’t matter one way or the other. I don’t need anyone else in my life now to start another relationship with. That’s not to say that the person wouldn’t be welcomed – it’s just, that time’s gone, for me. But from mum’s point of view, I’d definitely like it sorted,” he tells me.
Sue has submitted her DNA to five other sites to maximise her chances. She checks Ancestry every day for new matches. “When I go to bed, I’ve got my phone, I’ve got my spreadsheet, and I have to get on it. It’s just a huge mystery to solve.”
She and Joan believe that if they could find this person, then their family will finally make sense. But what if they do, and he doesn’t want to be part of it? “We won’t know unless we find him,” Sue replies. “I need to find him, and I need to get the answers – and then work out the rest of it from there.”
As the years go on, Joan is ever more troubled by the idea that she may never find out what happened at the hospital. “Before I go, it would be lovely to know,” she tells me. “I know it sounds silly, but sometimes I can’t sleep.” She wipes her eyes beneath her glasses. “I hope he’s had a good life – that’s the main thing, isn’t it?”
Given the money and hours spent searching, and the mental anguish of believing that the son she brought up was not her own, and that her firstborn child – a baby she never got to hold – was raised in another family, is Joan glad she took the DNA test in the first place?
“Oh yes. Yes,” she replies, immediately. “Everybody wants the truth, don’t they?”
