A small, green glass bottle was peacefully nestled at the bottom of the Cheboygan River and Jennifer Dowker's glass-bottomed boat happened to be just above it.
When Jennifer Dowker went scuba diving in Michigan last month, she never expected to stumble across a treasure that one family would cherish forever. A small, green glass bottle was peacefully nestled at the bottom of the Cheboygan River and Dowker's glass-bottomed boat happened to be just above it. After looking at it carefully, the 45-year-old realized that there was a piece of paper rolled up inside this mysterious bottle. "I thought, 'A message in a bottle? Cool!" she told The Washington Post while recalling the incident.
Having been in the river for so long, water had seeped into the bottle. Dowker knew she had to be extremely careful if she wanted to retrieve the paper in its legible state. Thus, she called her part-time employee, Rob Hemmer, who also works at a nearby local history museum, to help her with the task at hand. "Rob picked the broken cork out of the bottle with his jackknife and dumped out the water, then we carefully got the note out. "It was wet, and we were surprised to find that we could still read it," noted Dowker, who runs a company that offers cruises and shipwreck tours in Cheboygan.
The note dated November 1926, read: "Will the person who finds this bottle return this paper to George Morrow, Cheboygan, Michigan, and tell where it was found?" As instructed, Dowker set out to find the address by posting about it on her company's Facebook page. "So look what I found when I was washing windows and cruising along with the fish. Any Morrows out there know a George Morrow that would've written this circa 1926?" she wrote. "COOLEST night diving EVER." By the time Dowker woke up the next morning, the post had gone viral after being shared over 114,000 times.
It was a helpful stranger named René Szatkowski, who helped Dowker by finding a way to get in touch with George's daughter, Michele Primeau. It was apparently George's online obituary that led her to Michele. "You don't know me and this may be really strange, but there are people looking for you on the internet," Szatkowski said when she called up George's daughter. Szatkowski also revealed that she helped with the search because "I know that I would cherish something like that from my own family's past."
When Michele learned about the existence of her father's letter, she couldn't help but be excited. Speaking to The Post, she revealed that her father sent the message around his 18th birthday. "My dad was born in November, and I can just picture him going down to the river on his 18th birthday and tossing the bottle in," she said, adding that World War II was "really sentimental." She continued, "I could see him doing something like that. When we were kids and went camping at Lake Huron, I remember he did the same thing once. He put a note in a bottle and threw it into the lake."
Unfortunately, George died back in 1995 due to dementia-related complications. While Dowker wished to return the note to the writer's loved ones, Michele was of the view that it should stay with the person who found it. "Wouldn't it be nice if Jenn could keep it in her office so everyone who came in could see it?" said George's daughter. "It will be a way for my dad to live on. I really like the idea of sharing it."
Cover image source: Facebook | Nautical North Family Adventures
Share on Facebook