It took Clarence Hynes five years to order a DNA test, which would prove the inevitable fact he didn’t want to confront.
His family was not his biological family. His childhood experiences should have belonged to someone else.
Hynes discovered in 2013 that he was likely switched at birth at a cottage hospital in Come By Chance, N.L., 51 years earlier. In 2018, he confirmed it with a test.
“In ’13 I didn’t want to accept it,” he said in an interview with CBC this week. “I couldn’t get my head around it. It was just devastating. I was just — couldn’t even deal with it. At that time I went into a depression, struggled with it for a couple years.”
Hynes and the other man who had been switched at birth, Craig Avery, have filed a lawsuit against the health authority responsible for the hospital, which closed in 1986. Hynes said the case hasn’t really progressed, citing an issue with the statute of limitations in the province.
While he’s still struggling to come to terms with his reality, Hynes said an apology from the provincial government would go a long way for his suffering. He watched earlier this month as Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew apologized to two men in a similar situation in that province.
“I think we deserve an apology,” Hynes said. “Then we’ll let the lawyers deal with that and let it fall where it may.”
In 2019, Eastern Health — the health authority that has been folded into Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services — told CBC News that “Eastern Health empathizes with the individuals and families involved.” At the time, the authority was reviewing court documents. The two men have not received an apology since.
CBC News has asked the Department of Health for comment.
An unlikely discovery
Hynes was raised in St. Bernard’s, while Avery was raised more than 100 kilometres away in Hillview.
They grew up with brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers that weren’t their own. Both men bear a striking resemblance to each other’s families, something that Hynes said was pointed out to him over the years. He can remember people telling him he looked like the Avery family as far back as 1993.
Clarence Peter Hynes and Craig Harvey Avery had no idea they weren’t raised with their birth families, until Avery’s wife unravelled the mystery. CBC’s Mark Quinn reports.
In a twist of fate, both men were hired to work at Bull Arm in 2014. So was Craig Avery’s wife, Tracey.
On her first day there, Tracey ran into Hynes and was blown away. She told her husband he looked exactly like his brother, Clifford.
Her suspicions were cemented when her coworkers held a birthday celebration for her husband, and Hynes mentioned it was his birthday, too.
She asked where he was born, and realized the two men had been born in the same hospital, on the same day.
After that, Avery decided to take things a step further. He went to his family doctor and asked for a DNA test.
When he compared his results to the man he thought was his biological brother, it was not a match.
Hynes, however, didn’t want to believe it.
Other cases uncovered
Both men told their story to CBC reporter Mark Quinn in 2019. In the days following the story’s publication, another family came forward.
Muriel and Cecil Stringer said they were handed the wrong baby boy in 1962 — the same year as the Avery/Hynes mix up, at the same hospital.
The Stringers said they noticed on the long taxi ride home to Trinity Bay that the baby in their care looked nothing like the child they had given birth to at the hospital.
Their suspicions were confirmed when they undressed the baby and saw the band on his arm, which had a different last name on it. As it turned out, the baby in the car had only been born a few hours before, whereas the Stringer’s baby was three days old.
In another case, a Triton mother long suspected the child she raised was not the one she gave birth to at the Springdale cottage hospital in 1969.
In 2022, she discovered she was right. Arlene Lush and Caroline Weir-Greene had been switched at birth.
“When I heard, I fell to the floor,” Arlene Lush told CBC News in 2022. “Dropped. I thought the world is done. I don’t have nobody now. You know, the parents that I had are not my parents and the parents that created me are no longer around. So I thought I don’t have nobody.”
Clarence Hynes said the province needs to acknowledge the wrongs that were done in their cases. If there’s no case in the courtroom, he said the government can at least admit mistakes were made and people suffered.
“I’m still not 100 per cent,” he said. “I still tries to work. Sometimes I works for a few months, then I’ve got to leave work and take time off. It’s just not easy to wrap your head around it. It’s just, it’s too much.”
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