There’s a story in yesterday’s Washington Post “WHO WAS SHE? A DNA TEST ONLY OPENED NEW MYSTERIES” describing how until almost the second half of the 20th century hospitals in NYC and in America weren’t very good at correctly identifying newborns and sending them home with the correct parents. The article focuses on an Irish woman who just for the fun of it did a DNA test and found out that her “Irish” grandfather, born in Manhattan, was in fact an Ashkenazic Jew. His Irish parents were given the wrong baby while the Jewish parents took him the Irish baby. No one realized this mistake until a hundred years later when she did this DNA test. Both babies were born the same day at the same hospital using the same doctor and it turned out their birth certificates were one number apart from each other.
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