A woman felt like she won the lottery when she found a ‘message in a bottle’ written by a teenage boy in 1926.
45-year-old Jennifer Dowker from Michigan was diving in the Cheboygan River when she spotted a green bottle with a note inside.
After posting her amazing discovery on Facebook, she was contacted by the author’s daughter, 74-year-old Michele Primeau.
The message in a bottle reads: “Will the person who finds this bottle return this paper to George Morrow, Cheboygan, Michigan and tell where it was found? November 1926.”
Mr. Morrow’s daughter had recognized the handwriting right away.
Michele said that her late father had a habit of leaving notes for people to find. Her father had passed away in 1995 and the date on the letter reveals that he threw the bottle in the river before his 18th birthday.
Speaking about her discovery, Jennifer said: “I am just so flabbergasted by the whole situation. It’s incredible. I am sitting back in awe at everything. It was like winning the lottery in my mind.
“That’s what’s so weird about this. It was like winning the lottery in my mind… to have the response it’s gotten on social media has knocked my socks off. We can tell the story to our clients and inspire them when they go on their own scuba dives.”
The mother-of-three continued: “I like to scuba dive the river and find old artifacts. I have a good time doing that. I thought ‘I should find something interesting to keep his interest in scuba diving peaked’.
“I saw the little green bottle sitting on top of a fish bed. I picked it up and looked at it, and I could see the paper inside.
“It was about two-thirds full of water and I thought ‘oh no’, but I could find the word ‘this’ through the glass. I was like ‘holy c***, this is so cool’.”
She then posted a photo of the letter on Facebook where it received more than 6,000 comments and over 98,000 shares.
“One of the people messaging me gave me a phone number for a lady, but on my way home, the lady called me.
“She said “I’m 100 per cent sure this is my dad”. He’s dead now, he died in 1995 and she’s in her seventies. She was almost in tears. She said “this is exactly what he would do”. He was always putting papers in the wall and bottles in the water.
“She said he was born in November 15, so she figured he had dropped it in the water near his 18th birthday.”
Michele said the discovery helped her think about the happy memories of her dad during Father’s Day.
“I can’t believe all this. It was interesting because it was Father’s Day that weekend and it brought back lots of memories about him. I knew immediately it was my dad,” she expressed.
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