Switched at Birth

Have you ever had a nagging feeling that something was not just right pertaining to your life?
You had different characteristics than your parents, siblings, and other family members and that maybe, just maybe, you could have been switched at birth?
Well, for one former Henderson Countian, who now resides in Huntingdon, those feelings turned out to be real as DNA testing later proved. She discovered that her parents, although loving and caring, were not her real birth parents. But it took 57 years to find out the truth about who she really was.
“Not many people go through this kind of thing in life… I hope,” Teresa Ann Davis Carter said about her experience.
According to Teresa Ann Davis’ Certificate of Birth, she was born on September 14, 1962, at the Lexington-Henderson County Hospital. Supposedly, the day before, another baby girl was born, weighing only one ounce different than Teresa.
“My birth mother stated she birthed her child on September 13 at about 5:30 in the evening. She saw her baby immediately but not again for at least 5 hours. She also asked many times the next day but was told that baby was asleep, feeding, or being bathed.”
Her recollection is disturbing and likely indicates that something was going on at that time.
The switch, while as improbable as it sounds, wasn’t discovered until many years later, after Carter decided to take advantage of a special being offered by Ancestory.com. Those DNA test results proved not only life-changing for Carter, but it opened a window into a life she had suspected for years.
“The first time I realized something was different… my brothers and sisters had dark hair, but I didn’t,” said Carter. “And I was blond as a baby.”
At age 9 or 10, it was apparent that others noticed she looked different when she attended family reunions. Family members asked her dad who she favored in the family and he responded laughingly… “The Milk Man.” She knew she looked different than everyone else in her family.
Carter grew up in Huron with her parents that brought her home from the hospital, Tommy and Patricia Ann Horton Davis. She attended Westover Elementary, graduated from Lexington High School and Jackson State Community College as well as The University of Tennessee at Martin and worked at FirstBank for 19 years.
It was after she married Dr. Lee Carter of Huntingdon that he became very interested in his family history and purchased DNA testing kits from Ancestry.com. He had taken advantage of a buy one, get one free offer.
In 2019, Carter took the DNA test from Ancestry.com, which is the largest for-profit genealogical company in the world, and provides tools for researching family history, genealogy research, and setting up a family tree.
A year after taking the test, Carter said she started receiving odd email messages. She ignored these emails until May 23, 2020, when she received a message stating that her parents had done nothing wrong, but there was something she needed to know about her life. It turns out the emails were from her birth half-sister. The curiosity got the better of Carter and she picked up the phone and dialed the number.
“I’m your half-sister,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “You were switched at birth.” She and my birth brother had done the research as far as checking out my FaceBook page photos and birthdate.
Connecting with that mysterious person changed Carter’s life. That simple phrase, “switched at birth,” kept going through her mind. She began doing more research, trying to figure out how it happened and who she really was.
She started looking closer at family photos, checking Facebook accounts, and searching for more information about her birth family and other relatives.
This sister sent Carter photos to compare. One was of Carter’s own son, and the other that of the biological brother. The resemblance was “striking.”
“My son looks like he is my brother’s child,” Carter said. “That’s freaky.”
Then came the picture of her birth mother. “I look like her,” Carter said.
She began to realize why so many people thought she looked different than her family members.
“I looked different, because I was different.” Carter stated.
The more she looked at photos on Facebook, the more she realized she really had been switched at birth.
Carter doesn’t know how the switch occurred. Childbirth was different in the early 60s, and hospital stays were much longer then.
The most common identity method for babies used in the 1960s was the armband that was put on immediately after birth.
Carter has the photo of her mother holding her baby and that armband was attached tightly.
In that era, most women were given twilight anesthesia for childbirth, a sedation technique that doesn’t deeply sedate patients. In those days doctors did not go into the nursery immediately after the mother gave birth so one of the nurses would take the baby to the nursery and attach the identity armband as soon as possible. Note that nurses would rotate all positions during this time period, including the nursery, according to a nurse who still lives in Lexington and worked at this time at this hospital.
“There is no way this happened by accident,” Carter said she was told by several doctors and the above-mentioned nurse.
“The armband just didn’t fall off the arms of two babies,” Carter said. “How would it come off of two of them?”
For Carter, her father did not believe the results of the first DNA test, so she took another through 23andMe.com. Those results were the same...
The remainder of the story will run in next week’s edition.