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Kevin McMahon, a telecommunications worker, always had an unsettling gut feeling that something about his identity didn’t quite add up. That feeling turned into undeniable truth when a DNA test, prompted by curiosity and confirmed by Ancestry.com, revealed he had been living someone else’s life for over six decades.
The discovery, he says, has left him emotionally devastated and is now the subject of a legal battle against the hospital where it all began: Jamaica Hospital in Queens, New York.
According to court documents obtained by The New York Post, Kevin and another baby boy, Ross McMahon, were born just 45 minutes apart at the same hospital in 1959. Due to an unfortunate mix-up, both newborns were labeled “Baby McMahon,” and issued consecutive birth certificate numbers. The confusion led to the two infants being handed to the wrong families — an error that went unnoticed for 64 years.
Kevin, who was raised in Richmond Hill, recounted years of feeling out of place within his family. “It was like the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle,” he said. “The DNA test explained everything about why my childhood was the way it was.”
His sister, Carol Vignola, admitted that she too had doubts growing up. “He looked different — darker eyes, darker complexion. I always wondered.”
The emotional toll was heavy. Kevin revealed that his paternal grandmother, who likely suspected the truth, was cold and abusive toward him. “She was loving toward my siblings but made me feel unwanted. I learned to fear her.”
His self-worth, he says, took a severe hit. “I literally couldn’t come to terms with the information. I thought to myself, ‘I’m nobody… I don’t exist.’”
A Similar Case Across the Atlantic
Kevin’s story is not an isolated one. In southern England, a woman — who asked to be identified as Susan — recently uncovered a similar truth about her own life, thanks to a home DNA test.
Now in her mid-70s, Susan purchased a testing kit hoping to learn more about her heritage. Instead, the results sparked a stunning journey that revealed she had been swapped at birth in the 1950s in a busy NHS maternity ward.
Six years after taking the test, she received a message from a man claiming to be her genetic sibling. After extensive genealogical digging by her daughter, Susan found birth records that confirmed the unthinkable: she and another baby girl, born the same day and in the same hospital, had been mistakenly switched.
“I went into complete panic,” she recalled. “My brain was all over the place.”
While Susan’s upbringing was filled with love, she said she never quite resembled her family. The truth, she says, brought some closure but also created emotional complexities. Her relationship with her legal brother has grown stronger, while connections with her biological relatives remain distant.
“I know they’re my blood, but there’s no emotional bond,” she said.
Susan has since received compensation from the NHS trust involved — one of the first such cases in the UK. More importantly, she received an official apology acknowledging the historic mistake. “It was never about the money,” she added. “I just wanted someone to admit what happened.”
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