Two 67-year-old Canadian men discover they were SWITCHED AT BIRTH – one went to loving household, while the other endured foster care and discrimination

• Two men discovered through at-home DNA tests that they were switched at birth which led to one being raised as an indigenous person, despite being Ukrainian 
• Richard Beauvais was raised by his part-Cree mother in Canada while Eddy Ambrose was raised a Catholic 
• The pair have recruited a lawyer in the hope of receiving compensation and an apology from the Canadian government  

A pair of Canadian men, 68, found out through home DNA tests that they had been separated at birth and had been raised by each other’s biological families.

One of the men, Richard Beauvais, grew up believing he was indigenous, facing foster care and discrimination for his presumed ethnicity, but was actually Ukrainian.

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

In 2022, a woman named Evelyn Stocki took a similar test and discovered that Beauvais was her full-blood sibling. She then realized that Beauvais and her brother Eddy Ambrose were born on the same day in 1955 in Manitoba in the same hospital, leading to the discovery of the switch. 

Beauvais and Ambrose eventually connected and discussed their shared twist of fate.

‘We both agree that if we opened up and nobody else knew about it, we have just shut the book, and we wouldn’t have told anyone,’ Beauvais told the Times. 

Eddy Ambrose, a Manitoba man who was switched at birth, holds photos of his parents James and Katherine Ambrose

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

Beauvais, whose mother was part Cree, said in his interview with the Times that he fell victim to government policy that saw indigenous children separated from their parents and brought into white families. 

The practice became known as the Sixties Scoop.  

‘Richard told me I probably wouldn’t have survived – it was that brutal,’ Ambrose said in the Times’ piece. He described his childhood as happy as he was raised in a Ukrainian culture. Ambrose worked as an upholsterer and is now retired. 

‘I’ve been robbed of my life. It’s something I won’t get back. I lost that time. But there is the time now on,’ Ambrose told the Globe and Mail in February. He added that the pair planned a joint birthday party in June. 

Despite the results of the DNA test, Beauvais maintains that he’s still indigenous saying ‘just because I’m not Native now, in my mind, 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 occurred at a small hospital in Manitoba named the Arborg Hostpial on June, 28, 1955. 

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

‘The hardest time in my life, I think, is when I had to phone my two sisters … and tell them that I was not really their brother,’ he told the station. 

‘How do you have the wrong baby and give it to the parent? What happened at that time? It’s something I will never be able to explain. Obviously, it was a big, careless mistake,’ Ambrose added. 

The pair have recruited a lawyer to get to the bottom of how and why they were switched. 

Their attorney, Bill Gange, told CBC in February that they were told in by the health department that the organization is accepting no liability and will not offer any compensation to the pair. 

Beauvais told the station at the time: ‘I think it’s shameful that the government won’t at least try to help us straighten this out.’ 

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

‘It took a lot out of me. I lost a whole chunk out of me basically. It felt like someone ripped your heart out,’ Ambrose said in his interview with CTV. 

Beauvais said that since Ambrose learned that he’s not really Ukrainian, he is eager to learn about Native culture. He applied to join the Manitoba Metis Federation, an Indigenous organization. 

Beauvais went on to speak about the difficulty in learning that he’s not Native by blood. 

‘I guess I fought for the right to be native. Whenever anyone teased me about it, I would fight them when I was a kid, and I was kind of proud to say I was native. And you don’t understand it until it’s taken away from you suddenly,’ he said. 

While Ambrose said that even though he and Beauvais are not brothers, they have an eternal connection. 

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

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