Book details Dunedin baby switch mistake

On Christmas Eve, 1946, in Dunedin a lively, dark-skinned boy and a reserved, fair-headed boy were mistakenly given to the wrong parents in hospital.

Now, more than 60 years on, their story is the subject of a new book, written by one of the "boys", The Otago Daily Times reported. Jim Chuchman and Fred George did not discover the truth until the they had DNA tests in 2002, but an explanation for the switch remains a mystery.

Mr Churchman should have been raised a Lebanese Catholic and Mr George, who is a fair-headed Anglo-Saxon, should have been raised in a middle-class Presbyterian home.

The Churchman family had early suspicions that everything did not seem quite right, but when Mr Churchman was still a teenager hospital authorities confirmed there was no mistake.

Only one of the four parents, Helen Churchman, 86, is still alive. She remembers wondering why her new baby seemed much darker than his older brother and father but attributed it to her own mother's darkish complexion, or Welsh ancestry.

Mr George stood out even more, although his mother, Ngaire, was Caucasian and married into the Lebanese community.

Life growing up was not always easy for either boy. Both stood out from their brothers and sisters in looks and personality. Neither felt he fitted in. A school yard friendship in Timaru in about 1961 set the wheels in motion for the truth to emerge. Mr Churchman became friends with Mr George's older brother Michael. This led to a number of visits and meals with the Georges - and the woman who was actually his natural mother.

Mr Churchman trained in engineering, working as a marine engineer and in meat processing plants, before setting up in business in Hamilton, selling and installing spa pools.

Mr George left school at 16 and worked in all sorts of jobs around Dunedin before touring the world with a social rugby team in his mid-20s.

He met an Italian American and settled in Massachusetts, working primarily as a baker.

He has just completed and published a book on his life called Switched At Birth: My Life in Someone Else's World. The men decided to get DNA tests after medical problems in both families, and Mr Churchman's own thoughts that Mr George looked his own brother Owen.

"Once we had concrete, undeniable proof that a terrible mistake had been made 57 years before, other things started to come together," he said. "Jim really had the George temperament. Temperamentally, I've always been more conservative, more like a Churchman, even before that was a consideration.

"No matter who brings us up, our genes will follow us until we die."