95-year-old message in a bottle found and returned to writer’s daughter

Note written in 1926 reads: ‘Will the person who finds this bottle return this paper to George Morrow Cheboygan, Michigan and tell where it was found?’

A 95-year-old message in a bottle has been discovered by a scuba diver in Michigan’s Cheboygan River - and returned to the daughter of the man who wrote it.

Jennifer Dowker, owner of Nautical North Family Adventures, was swimming in the river on Friday to clean one of the windows on her glass-bottomed boat when she made the find, which sat on the bottom of the river, around 10ft underwater.

“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,” Ms Dowker told CNN. “It was kind of like ‘Holy Smokes! We’ve got a message in a bottle here. Cool!'”

She showed the bottle, which was about 2/3 filled with water, to her first mate and a potential diving client, then used a small tool to pull out the note before gently unrolling it to read its contents.

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?”

Ms Dowker shared pictures of the letter on her company’s Facebook page, which went viral with more than 100,000 shares and more than 6,000 comments.

She was eventually put in touch with Morrow’s daughter, Michelle Primeau, who said she got a call from a complete stranger who had seen Ms Dowker’s post and decided to track her down.

Ms Primeau said she recognised her father’s handwriting when she sawa picture of the note.

She said his birthday was in November and he would have been 17 or 18 when he wrote the note and threw it into the river.

“I can just see him going out and doing that because it was his birthday,” she told CNN. “I don’t know for sure. But it just sounds like something he would have done.”

Ms Primeau said her father, who died in 1995, was sentimental and she remembered him leaving a note in their wall during renovations and throwing another message in a bottle into Lake Huron on a family camping trip.

“So he’s been gone a long time, but it was kind of cool because all this happened on Father’s Day weekend,” she said.

Ms Dowker wanted to return the message and the bottle, but Ms Primeau said she should keep it.

“I thought the right thing to do would be to give it to her,” she said. “She found it and that would keep my dad’s name living on.”

Ms Dowker said she would frame the bottle and message to put up in the boat, or in the company’s office and gift shop, and Ms Primeau said she was going to send a photo of her father at that age for the display.

Ms Primeau said she was planning a trip to Cheboygan to see her father’s note in September.