Adopted black woman lived a normal life, then made startling discovery about her heritage

One afternoon, 28-year-old Sarah Culberson was taking a stroll through Venice when her phone lit up with an unfamiliar call. She ducked into a nearby vintage shop for privacy and, hidden among the racks of clothes, answered. On the other end was a voice she’d never heard before—her birth father. Hearing him for the first time sent waves of emotion through her. That moment would change her life forever. As she soon learned, Sarah wasn’t just an ordinary person; she was royalty, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Sarah was adopted just two days before her first birthday by Jim and Judy Culberson in West Virginia, as she shared in a YouTube documentary. She had spent her first nine months with her birth mother and three months in foster care before joining her adoptive family, who loved her deeply. Though she was happy growing up with her parents and two white sisters, lingering questions about her birth family always left her feeling unsettled. She wanted to find them but feared rejection, especially from her birth father. “I was really angry at my birth father. I thought, where was he? Didn’t he want to meet me? Didn’t he want to talk to me?” she remembered.

Anyway, she hired a private investigator to track down her birth family for a fee of $25. He recommended her to write a letter. As her handwritten letter reached a woman in an African village, she dialed a call to Sarah and told her she was her aunt. “Sarah, do you know who you are,” the aunt asked. Then said, “You’re a princess.”

On one hand, Sarah was overwhelmed, but on the other hand, her greatest fear got triggered again: the fear of getting rejected by her father. At this time, she was living in Los Angeles. Two weeks later, she was plodding down the airplane stairway and making her way to the blue gate of Sierra Leone in West Africa. 

At the gate was her father, standing to greet her. She gave him a big hug, tears welling in her eyes. Her father apologized for not finding her first. “Your name changed,” he said. “I didn’t know how to find you,” he added. He told her that she was given up for adoption because, at that time, her parents were too young to take care of her. She accepted his apology, and the next day, they sat in her father’s Range Rover to drive through what she called the “Indiana Jones road.” 

Culberson recalled meeting with her father during an interview. “The man who I thought wouldn’t want anything to do with me was so afraid that I wouldn’t want anything to do with him,” she said. She left Bumpe donning an emerald African dress that was a gift from her father. Culberson was stunned to see the reception she got as hundreds of women cheered and clapped for her as they sang in their native language Mende. “Sarah, you have come to your homeland, welcome home,” they sang.

However, despite being a princess, she didn’t find herself entering a fairyland brimming with stars and glitter. Rather, the village she arrived at, was nothing but mounds of rubble, crumbling buildings, and kids with amputated limbs. The 11-year civil war had wreaked havoc on her hometown. But despite everything, people were cheering at her arrival. Hundreds of people were singing and dancing, welcoming their princess. Sarah was overwhelmed and disheartened at the same time.

Not long after, the princess initiated a non-profit organization, Sierra Leone Rising, which reconstructed town Bumpe’s collapsing school buildings, installed solar lanterns, and wells that serve 12,000 people with clean drinking water, using grants from Rotary International to which her father was associated. Building several partnerships and collaborations, Sarah also started an education program to teach young girls how to make sanitary pads that are built into their underwear, so girls stop dropping out of school. She also started a computer center to train kids how to code. She worked on the town’s hospital system and restored most of the schools’ toilet systems. “But we have more to do,” she said in the YouTube documentary.

"My only guidance of what a princess was what I saw in movies," Sarah told NBC News. “But it’s really about responsibility. It’s about walking in my great-grandfather and grandfather’s footsteps and what they’ve done for the country. I realized that’s my role as a princess, to keep moving things forward in the country.”

Putting her acting dream on hold, Sarah dedicated herself to transforming the picture of her hometown. In 2009, she published a book, “A Princess Found,” about her journey, which was thought to become an inspiration for a Disney movie, per CNN.

“I've learned to stay open in the journey of life because there is always a grander plan than our minds can imagine,” the princess wrote in an October 2019 Facebook post.

Editor's note: This article was originally published on August 2, 2024. It has since been updated.