Switched At Birth, US Man Discovers Truth After 64 Years Through DNA Test

A US man is taking a hospital to court after learning he was switched at birth with another baby of the same last name. Kevin McMahon, now 64, discovered the shocking truth after using Ancestry.com, a website helping people trace their family history.

The reported swap-up happened after Ross McMahon was born 45 minutes apart at the Jamaica Hospital in Queens. Both babies, with the last name McMahon, were given back-to-back birth certificate numbers.

They were both labelled "Baby McMahon," which confused the doctors, and they accidentally gave them to the wrong parents.

Hailing from Long Island, Kevin, who works in telecommunications, said he had a gut feeling for a long time that the people who raised him might not be his biological parents. So, he decided to go for a DNA test that confirmed his suspicion. 

According to the court documents obtained by The NY Post, he found out the truth in 2020 after the woman he believed to be his sister submitted her DNA to Ancestry.com. Later, she found that she had a biological brother she didn't even know existed. This cleared Kevin's doubts.

He said some of his family members didn't treat him right and always made him feel unwanted.

Raised in Richmond Hill, Kevin said, "It was like the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle. The DNA test explained everything about why my childhood was the way that it was."

Kevin's sister, Carol Vignola, said she always had a feeling that Kevin might not be her real brother because he had darker eyes and complexion.

He said, "It was like a shock reaction. I literally couldn't come to terms with the information."

"For a long time, I'm like, I'm not really Kevin McMahon. I'm really Ross McMahon. I thought to myself, 'I'm nobody ... I don't exist."

"It's just hard to deal with, just hard," he said.

When Kevin looks back at his childhood, he realises his paternal grandmother and the man he believed to be his father probably always suspected that he wasn't truly part of the family, and that's the reason they treated him badly.

He alleged that his grandmother was loving towards his siblings but that she used to dislike him. He said certain interactions with his grandmother "were abusive, physically abusive, and I learned to fear her and just stay away from her."

He got emotional and said, "It made me feel worthless. It destroyed my confidence."

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