EXCLUSIVE: 'Finding Your Roots' solved this woman's 140 year-old family mystery

Terrie Morrow has always considered herself somewhat of a family historian, so when she heard that "Finding Your Roots" was searching for viewers to appear on an episode of the PBS show, she was thrilled. But she almost missed her opportunity to decode a mystery that has troubled her family for over a century.

“The casting was about to wrap up by the time I saw it,” she tells TODAY.com.

After asking her mother and uncle for their blessing, the Alabama resident submitted her application, “not thinking that they would ever really contact me.”

Even when PBS reached out to let Morrow know she’d been selected to appear on the show, she didn’t initially notice their email. The network followed up and she ended up signing on to appear on the show just in the nick of time.

Morrow, who works as a school bus driver, has been researching her family tree since her early 20s and says it has become a "forever project."

“I’ve always been inquisitive. I heard somewhere that nosy people like history, so I figured out I must be nosy," she says.

Morrow has certainly learned a lot on her own, but she was eager to see if the "Finding Your Roots" team could find out why her great-grandfather's mother abandoned him as a child.

What happened to Morrow's great-grandfather?

When Morrow's great-grandfather Walter Tagger was 5 years old, his mother, Lenora Kirkland Chambers, left him with another family. For a few years, she wrote him letters and sent money. But then Tagger never heard from her again.

While talking with "Finding Your Roots" host Henry Louis Gates Jr. in the "Viewers Like You" episode that aired on April 9, Morrow explains why this mystery has haunted her for so long.

"Papa was important to me. But he can’t be here to solve that mystery ... Who wouldn't want to know what happened to their mother? So in his stead, for me to try to find out as much as I can, any answer is better than the answer that he had, which was nothing," she says.

While researching Morrow's family, the PBS team discovers that Chambers was white and Tagger's father, a married man named Hal Moore, was Black. At the time, interracial sex and marriage was illegal, so they could never have stayed together.

Chambers went on to start her own family with a white man and had two additional children. In a future census, she only listed two children, a fact that somewhat stings when Morrow hears it.

“I’m not mad at her. I feel bad for her because as a mother you don’t forget. You have to forget on paper when people question you. You have to pretend. But as a mother you don’t forget," she says.

Still, Morrow thinks her great-grandfather would've found comfort in knowing that Chambers' other children took care of her later in life. Sadly, both Chambers and her daughter Mary ended up dying around the same time and Mary's daughter was sent to live in an orphanage.

After learning more about Chambers' life, Morrow says she understands why she chose to leave Tagger, even if it was a heart-wrenching decision.

“She made a choice that saved her life, saved his life and brought me into the world,” she says. “She made the choice and I can honestly say I appreciate the choice that she made.”

A life-changing appearance on 'Finding Your Roots'

Morrow has been watching “Finding Your Roots” since it went by another name, “African-American Lives,” and she's seen plenty of celebrities make life-changing discoveries about their ancestry.

Speaking to TODAY.com, Morrow says the show led to revelations of her own.

“Being on the show is a dream for me. But my very existence is a culmination of the dreams of all (my ancestors). And that is the big deal for me, to know that there are so many people before me that every time I wake up, I am the somebody that they were looking forward to for their future,” she says.

For Morrow, the best and hardest part of appearing on the show came from the same thing: Getting answers to the question that she’d wondered about for so long.

"It was good to get them and hard to know that I couldn’t share them with some of those folks that it really would have meant the world to," she says.

Morrow describes her great-grandfather as “a gem” who made a “good, happy life” for himself despite the challenges he faced as a child. She also says her family was thrilled to learn more about his history.

"We answered a mystery that has been almost 140 years in the making," she says.

To celebrate her appearance on "Finding Your Roots," Morrow's family arranged to have a reunion timed to the episode's air date. The Alabama public television community also hosted a dinner on her behalf.

After filming her episode, Morrow even began doing some additional independent research on her own, and she's more hooked than ever on ancestry matters now.

"Every family member is a part of some history," she says.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com