Andy Samberg shared an update about his mother’s adoption story during the Tuesday episode of Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast.
In a 2019 episode of Finding Your Roots, the Saturday Night Live alum and his mother, Marjorie Marrow, finally learned the identity of her birth parents after Marrow, who was adopted, had struggled to track them down.
While Marrow’s biological mother and father both died by the time they filmed the episode, she learned that they briefly dated before they broke up and their respective families even held onto the same photograph of them together.
“They both, unbeknownst to each other, went looking through her biological parents’ stuff they still had, and they both found the same photograph of the two of them together,” Samberg told Poehler during the podcast episode. “They both had the same picture of them together when they had their brief time together … from a date in San Francisco.”
Marrow’s parents met in the Bay Area, which is ultimately where she and Samberg’s father raised the Saturday Night Live alum and his sisters.
Samberg also shared that he and his family discovered a reason why Marrow had a difficult time finding her birth parents before they appeared on Finding Your Roots. The PBS docuseries is hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., who examines the U.S. history and backgrounds of different families and celebrity guests.
“When it aired, it showed my mom’s adoption agency that she was adopted from,” Samberg said of his mother’s episode. “And it’s the place from Three Identical Strangers.” Samberg was referring to a 2018 documentary that followed a pair of identical triplets who were separated at birth by the Louise Wise adoption agency. The adoption agency ultimately closed in 2004.
“We were like, that’s why we could never find the records and find anything about it,” he continued. “Because they disappeared.”
While Samberg wasn’t completely sure why both of his birth grandparents’ families kept the same photo, he shared “a few theories” with Poehler.
“One is they thought maybe someday this exact thing would happen and they wanted her to find them,” he said. “If not, it’s just that maybe they both really enjoyed their time together.”
Samberg added it was possible that his mother’s birth parents’ families chose to honor the memory by saving the photo due to generational differences. “You don’t wipe your old relationships from social media, you keep them because they were special to you at the time,” he said.
