Baby-Switch Ordeal Is Still Unresolved After 41 Years : Michigan: Nurse’s error in 1952 gave two neighboring couples the wrong sons. The result has been decades of disbelief, acrimony, court battles.

When neighbors Janet Lord and Ellen Laisure arrived at the hospital, both about to give birth, hospital workers marveled at the coincidence and placed them in the same room.

That coincidence on New Year’s Eve, 1952, changed both families’ lives forever.

Hours after the women were admitted to Gerber Memorial Hospital in Fremont, Mich., the same doctor scurried between the deliveries of Leon Lord and Timothy John Laisure.

A nurse placed name tags near the table where the newborns were cleaned.

“That’s when it happened,” said Janet Lord’s husband, Earl. “She put the wrong tags on the babies. The first baby my wife saw was the baby we raised.

“He was not our child.”

After the births, Lord returned to military duty in Florida. His wife and the baby moved in with his family, across the street from the Laisures in the small town of Grant, Mich. The families visited frequently.

Both the Laisures were dark-complexioned and so was their first son, then a toddler.

“Here they had the new baby who was strawberry-blond, blue-eyed and very fair,” Earl Lord told the Muskegon Chronicle.

Likewise, the Lords--blond, blue-eyed and fair-skinned--were rearing a boy with dark eyes, dark hair and dark complexion.

“Ellen made comments jokingly that they must’ve mixed the kids up,” Lord said. “But Janet and her mother didn’t believe it. They dropped it.”

When Lord returned home from the Air Force in 1955 and saw his son, then almost 3, “I could see the difference right away,” he said. “I wanted my own son.”

Lord took his family to a Grand Rapids hospital for blood tests and doctors discovered the toddler they were rearing could not possibly be their biological son.

Attempts to talk with the Laisures resulted only in disbelief and acrimony, Lord said.

“I haven’t talked to them since,” said Lord, now 63 and living in Twin Lake, Mich. “There’s been an understanding, or truce.”

The Laisures, who still live in Grant, say the incident is better off forgotten.

“It happened very many years ago,” said Ora Laisure, Ellen’s husband. “It’s very emotional. I don’t understand why this is coming up now.”

Lord explained the mix-up to Leon when he was 12.

“Lee told me he always felt there was something, but he couldn’t put his finger on it,” Lord said.

Janet Lord told Timothy Laisure in 1972, when he announced his engagement.

“He had no idea,” Lord said. “He broke down and cried. Janet felt he and his bride had a right to know.”

The boys declined to talk at length, saying the topic remains too painful for the Laisures.

“He’s got my name and I got his,” said Timothy Laisure. “I’m always going to be a Lord, but I’ve been a Laisure for 40 years. I have no intention of changing my name, and I don’t think Lee does either.”

Lord eventually contacted a lawyer, but a state law at the time prevented lawsuits against nonprofit corporations. He and the hospital settled for $1,548 in February, 1960. Lord said he agreed because the family needed the cash.

Hospital spokesman David Hewitt said records show that the hospital never admitted any wrongdoing. He said none of the hospital’s current staff had been at the hospital long enough to have firsthand knowledge of the case and records don’t show the name of the attending nurse.

Lord, whose wife died in 1978 after they had three more children, said he felt compelled to tell his story because of guilt that he didn’t do enough to correct the mistake.

“I want people to know what happened, and I want my grandchildren--both sets--to know their heritage. This has been swept under the table for years.”