© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
For years, people around the globe have left messages in bottles and thrown them into the sea for various purposes. But rarely have they heard back. In an unexpected turn of events, a woman scuba diving in a river in Michigan, US found a message in a bottle nearly 100 years later. But what made it even more special was that she managed to trace it and found the daughter of the man who had written the letter!
Jennifer Dowker, the owner of glass-bottom boat tour company Nautical North Family Adventures, was scuba diving in the Cheboygan River recently when she found the treasure. The woman, a boat captain, was in the water to wash the windows of the vessel when she saw a shining object that got her attention — a tiny green glass bottle with a roll of paper inside.
As a collector of items found during her scuba diving experiences, the old-fashioned bottle caught her eye. The bottle was sitting about 10 feet underwater on the riverbed, she told CNN. “At first I thought it was just a cool bottle and then when I picked it up, when I was still under the water, I could read the word ‘this’ in the paper,” Dowker told the news outlet. She added that the bottle was two-thirds water with a damaged cork.
After retrieving the small note, she discovered it dated back to November 1926. “Will the person who finds this bottle return this paper to George Morrow Cheboygan, Michigan and tell where it was found?” the 95-year-old letter read.
According to USA Today, because Cheyboygan is a small town, she knew a couple of Morrows in the area. Dowker decided to post the photos on the bottle and the note on Facebook and see if there was any luck to find the writer’s family.
Take a look at the post below:
Unexpectedly, the post went viral and since then has amassed more than 1 lakh shares and 67,000 likes. It also got over 6,000 comments, where people united towards a single goal: to help her find the man. Many investigated their family trees and dug out old information. Eventually, they nearly achieved their goal.
A few days later, Dowker was contacted by Michele Primeau, the 74-year-old daughter of George Morrow. Primeau had received a call from a woman who had seen the story on Facebook and investigated it with ancestry.com, added the report.
Talking to Detroit Free Press, Dowker said, “She has a diary with his handwriting, so we’re super confident that it does belong to her.” The daughter of the man said her father was known to do things like that and Primeau said, “I wouldn’t put it past him to have placed that bottle in the water on his 18th birthday”.
Dowker spoke with the man’s daughter over the weekend and offered to give the note back to her. However, according to WPBN, the elderly woman later refused it saying she would rather they kept it on the boat. So, now captain Dowker plans on bringing the bottle and note onto the ship and keeping George Morrow’s story alive.
