Boat captain finds near-century-old note in bottle, connects with owner’s family

Jennifer Dowker, owner of a boat-tour company from

Michigan

found a glass bottle with a note dated November 1926 while scuba diving in Cheboygan River.

The posts by Dowker showing the note and the bottle have become viral on social media.

Dowker, the owner of Nautical North Family Adventures, was cleaning the windows at the bottom of her boat when the old bottle caught her eye.

The note inside the bottle was dated November 1926, i.e., was 95 years old, and read, “Will the person who finds this bottle return this paper to George Morrow Cheboygan, Michigan and tell where it was found?”


Dowker took to Instagram and Facebook to post about the note hoping to find someone who could claim the note. In a follow-up Instagram post by Dowker, she revealed she traced down the 74-year-old daughter of the man who wrote the note, Michele Primeau.


Primeau reached out to Dowker after the former received a call from a lady who had read the Facebook post and investigated it with ancestry.com, as reported by USA Today.

Since Dowker is a collector of glass bottles and other objects she finds on her expeditions, this bottle, too, caught her eye.

She told CNN that she found the bottle sitting on the riverbed, about 10 feet under underwater.

“I spotted that green bottle on top of the fish bed, so, I was like oh, that looks cool. So, I reached down and grabbed it and noticed there was paper in it,” said Dowker, as reported by CNN. The bottle was two-thirds full of water and had a deteriorate cork.

“It was a total shock, but knowing my dad, he always liked to do these little things,” said Primeau. She further added how her father had also put a note behind the panelling of their basement while they were building it.

The bottle and the note are now going to be kept on the boat as insisted by Primeau herself.

“Michele told us she would love if we displayed her father’s note and bottle for all our passengers to see. So, this is exactly what we plan to do… The name “George Morrow” will live on in the shop of the Yankee Sunshine ☀️,” said Dowker’s Instagram post.