Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes leads Names Unknown. Her heartfelt mission is to help find the identities of missing birthparents and grandparents for as many searchers as possible. She works with adopted and donor-conceived people and anyone grappling with unknown parentage.

An adopted person herself, Sarah knows what it’s like to grow up not understanding the face in the mirror and being expected to live life as if biology wasn’t important.

Through Names Unknown, Sarah brings together two strengths to solve identity searches: logic and storytelling. Her logic developed through 30+ years in business strategy consulting, much with The Boston Consulting Group, where she learned to build issue trees with mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive branches. A knack for story (inherited, it turned out, from her raconteur ancestors in the Pindus mountains) led to short stories and modern Gothic novels and helps her imagine what-ifs behind historical records that help solve long time family mysteries.

Delivering evidence-based answers matters: Sarah believes everyone deserves to know their origins. What searchers do with the answers she finds is up to them, but without answers, there is no choice.

Genealogy has been Sarah’s favourite hobby for decades, since at age ten she asked her grandfather to draw his family tree. She cut her teeth on DNA analysis by hunting for a missing grandparent in her immediate family in 2018-19. It took a year to deduce the methodology from first principles — there were few accessible guides back then — and to name the grandparent. Then she grappled with a Not Parent Expected (NPE) who had been hiding in plain sight in the family DNA matches. More complex cases followed as she sharpened her skills as a genetic genealogist. Her deepest experience lies in UK, New Zealand and Australian records.

ACTIVITIES, MEMBERSHIPS, and EDUCATION

  • Volunteer at Wikitree Adoption Angels
  • Member of New Zealand Society of Genealogists
  • Member of International Society of Genetic Genealogists
  • Member of Association of Professional Genealogists (application pending)
  • MA (Hons) Cambridge and MBA (London BS)