Photo: Courtesy Jennifer Dowker
While scuba diving in Michigan earlier this month, Jennifer Dowker found a treasure.
A small, green glass bottle with a piece of paper rolled up inside was sitting at the bottom of the Cheboygan River — just underneath Dowker’s glass-bottom boat.
“I thought, ‘A message in a bottle? Cool!'” Dowker, 45, toldThe Washington Post.
“Rob picked the broken cork out of the bottle with his jackknife and dumped out the water, then we carefully got the note out,” she said. “It was wet, and we were surprised to find that we could still read it.”
Courtesy Jennifer Dowker
The note read: “Will the person who finds this bottle return this paper to George Morrow, Cheboygan, Michigan, and tell where it was found?”
It was dated November 1926.
Dowker — who runs a company that takes tourists on cruises and shipwreck tours in Cheboygan — toldThePostthat she immediately posted about the bottle on her company’sFacebook pagein hopes of finding someone who knew George.
“So look what I found when I was washing windows and cruising along with the fish,” she wrote. “Any Morrows out there know a George Morrow that would’ve written this circa 1926?”
“COOLEST night diving EVER,” she added.
A helpful internet stranger, René Szatkowski, found a way to get in contact with George’s daughter, Michele Primeau, whom she found through George’s online obituary.
She said she chose to help with the search because “I know that I would cherish something like that from my own family’s past.”
So, when she called Primeau, she said: “You don’t know me and this may be really strange, but there are people looking for you on the internet.”
As it turns out, George sent the message off right 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,” Primeau toldThe Post.
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The World War II veteran was “really sentimental,” she added. “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.”
George died in 1995 of causes related to dementia, his daughter said.
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Although Dowker wanted to return the note to George’s loved ones, Primeau said she decided that the note should stay with the person who discovered it.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if Jenn could keep it in her office so everyone who came in could see it?” she said. “It will be a way for my dad to live on. I really like the idea of sharing it.”
source: people.com
