We always joked dad looked nothing like his parents – then we found out why

Matthew’s dad had brown eyes and black hair. His grandparents had piercing blue eyes.

There was a running joke in his family that “dad looked nothing like his parents”, the teacher from southern England says.

It turned out there was a very good reason for this.

Matthew’s father had been swapped at birth in hospital nearly 80 years ago. He died late last year before learning the truth of his family history.

Matthew – not his real name – contacted the BBC after we reported on the case of Susan, who received compensation from an NHS trust after a home DNA test revealed she had been accidentally switched for another baby in the 1950s.

BBC News is now aware of five cases of babies swapped by mistake in maternity wards from the late 1940s to the 1960s.

Lawyers say they expect more people to come forward driven by the increase in cheap genetic testing.

During the pandemic, Matthew started looking for answers to niggling questions about his family history. He sent off a saliva sample in the post to be analysed.

The genealogy company entered his record into its vast online database, allowing him to view other users whose DNA closely matched his own.

“Half of the names I’d just never heard of,” he says. “I thought, ‘That’s weird’, and called my wife to tell her the old family joke might be true after all.”

Matthew then asked his dad to submit his own DNA sample, which confirmed he was even more closely related to the same group of mysterious family members.

Matthew started exchanging messages with two women who the site suggested were his father’s cousins. All were confused about how they could possibly be related.

Working together, they eventually tracked down birth records from 1946, months after the end of World War Two.

The documents showed that one day after his father was apparently born, another baby boy had been registered at the same hospital in east London.

That boy had the same relatively unusual surname that appeared on the mystery branch of the family tree, a link later confirmed by birth certificates obtained by Matthew.

It was a lightbulb moment.

“I realised straight away what must have happened,” he says. “The only explanation that made sense was that both babies got muddled up in hospital.”

Matthew and the two women managed to construct a brand new family tree based on all of his DNA matches.

“I love a puzzle and I love understanding the past,” he says. “I’m quite obsessive anyway, so I got into trying to reverse engineer what had happened.”

Before World War Two, most babies in the UK were born at home, or in nursing homes, attended by midwives and the family doctor.

That started to change as the country prepared for the launch of the NHS in 1948, and very gradually, more babies were delivered in hospital, where newborns were typically removed for periods to be cared for in nurseries.

“The baby would be taken away between feeds so that the mother could rest, and the baby could be watched by either a nursery nurse or midwife,” says Terri Coates, a retired lecturer in midwifery, and former clinical adviser on BBC series Call The Midwife.