- Two Canadian men discovered they were switched at birth in 1955 after taking DNA tests.
- But they said the discovery prompted an avalanche of confusion and existential crisis.
Two 68-year-old Canadian men discovered they were switched at birth in 1955 after taking DNA tests that caused an existential crisis for both.
The Globe and Mail first reported the story in February, and The New York Times followed with another report in August.
"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," Richard Beauvais, one of the men, told the Times in a report published Wednesday.
Beauvais, who is a fisherman and a businessman, took a DNA test that he received as a gift from his eldest daughter in 2020. He told the Globe that he was stumped by the revelation that his ancestry was Ukrainian, Polish, and Ashkenazi Jewish rather than the Indigenous and French heritage he believed to be his own.
Two years later, Evelyn Stocki took a DNA test that showed that Beauvais was her full-blooded sibling, the Globe reported. They connected the dots when they learned that Beauvais and Stocki's younger brother, Eddy Ambrose, was born on the same day in the same hospital in Manitoba, Canada.
This discovery brought an avalanche of confusion for Beauvais and Ambrose, who led contrasting lives marked by their Indigenous and Ukrainian Catholic upbringings.
Beauvais told the publications that he experienced Canada's brutal policies against Indigenous people during his childhood firsthand because he was painfully separated from his Cree mother as part of efforts to assimilate Indigenous children into white families.
"Richard told me I probably wouldn't have survived — it was that brutal," Ambrose told the Times of Beauvais' upbringing. Ambrose, a retired upholsterer, had a happy upbringing immersed in Ukrainian Catholic culture, per the outlet.
Today, Ambrose is reconnecting with his Métis — or mixed Indigenous and Euro-American ancestry — culture by reaching out to his new extended family.
He told the Globe: "I've been robbed of my life. It's something I won't get back. I lost that time. But there is the time from now on."
Beauvais, too, spoke of the sense of loss to the Times after the discovery but affirmed that "just because I'm not Native now, in my mind, I always will be."
The Globe reported in February that the two were planning to celebrate their 68th birthday together in June.