Two 67-year-old Canadian men discover they were switched at birth – one went to a loving household, while the other went through foster care and discrimination

A pair of Canadian men, aged 68, discovered through home DNA testing that they were separated at birth and raised by each other’s biological families.

One of the men, Richard Beauvais, grew up believing he was Indigenous, faced foster care and discrimination because of his supposed ethnicity, but was actually Ukrainian.

Beauvais told the New York Times that he discovered his true ethnicity when his daughter gave him a 23andMe test in 2020. The test revealed that his ethnicity was Ukrainian, Polish and Ashkenazi Jewish, despite being raised natively and having some French heritage.

In 2022, a woman named Evelyn Stocki took a similar test and found that Beauvais was her full-blooded sibling. She then realized that Beauvais and her brother Eddy Ambrose had been born on the same day in Manitoba in 1955 in the same hospital, which led to the discovery of the switch.

Beauvais and Ambrose eventually got together and discussed their shared twist of fate.

“We both agree that if we opened up and no one else knew about it, we would have just closed the book and not told anyone,” Beauvais told The Times.

The story first appeared in the Canada Globe and Mail in February and was the subject of a feature of a New York Times theme this month.

Beauvais, whose mother was part Cree, said in his interview with the Times that he fell victim to the government’s policy of separating indigenous children from their parents and placing them in white families.

The practice became known as the Sixties premiere.

“Richard told me I probably wouldn’t have survived — it was that cruel,” Ambrose said in the Times piece. He described his childhood as happy as he had grown up in a Ukrainian culture. Ambrose worked as an upholsterer and is now retired.

‘I have been robbed of my life. It’s something I can’t get back. I lost that time. But time is up for that now,” Ambrose told the Globe and Mail in February. He added that the couple had planned a joint birthday party in June.

Despite the results of the DNA test, Beauvais maintains that he is still Indigenous, saying ‘just because I am not Indigenous now, I always will be’.

A photo of the biological siblings of Eddy Ambrose, a Manitoba man who was switched at birth, photographed at his home in Winnipeg, Manitoba

The switch took place at a small hospital in Manitoba called the Arborg Hostpial on June 28, 1955.

Beauvais told CTV in February that he hadn’t paid much attention to his test results until Ambrose’s family contacted him.

“The hardest time in my life, I think, was when I had to call my two sisters… and tell them I wasn’t really their brother,” he told the station.

“How do you get the wrong baby and give it to the parent? What happened then? It’s something I’ll never be able to explain. It was clearly a big, careless mistake,” Ambrose added.

The pair have engaged a lawyer to find out how and why they were switched.

That’s what their lawyer, Bill Gange, told them CBC in February that they were told by the health department that the organization accepts no liability and will not offer any compensation to the couple.

Beauvais told the station at the time: “I find it shameful that the government is not at least trying to help us put this right.”

The switch took place at a small hospital in Manitoba called the Arborg Hostpial on June 28, 1955. This is Eddy as a baby

‘It has taken a lot out of me. I actually lost a lot of myself. It felt like someone ripped your heart out,” Ambrose said in his interview with CTV.

Beauvais said that ever since Ambrose found out he’s not really Ukrainian, he’s been eager to learn more about the native culture. He applied to join the Manitoba Metis Federation, an indigenous organization.

Beauvais went on to speak of the difficulty of learning that he is not native by blood.

“I think I fought for the right to be indigenous. Whenever someone teased me about it, I used to fight them as a kid, and I was pretty proud to say I was native. And you don’t understand it until it’s suddenly taken away from you,’ he said.

While Ambrose said that although he and Beauvais are not brothers, they have an eternal bond.

‘I call him my brother. Even though we’re not brothers, we’re brothers in a way.”