A Diver Uncovered a 95-Year-Old Message In A Bottle In Michigan — And Returned It To Its Owner

Bringing the bottle to the surface, Dowker realized that it contained a message. The note was written almost 100 years ago, too. This naturally raised the question, who wrote the message back in the 1920s, only to toss it into the river? Inspired by her unexpected find, the diver decided to try to track down the author.

The note had been signed by one George Morrow. But as Dowker only had the author's name and a location, she couldn't exactly perform an exhaustive search. So she turned to social media in the hopes of finding the mysterious letter-writer or any of his descendants. This set off an unexpected chain of events that brought the history of Cheboygan, MI, to life.

The discovery happened on June 18, 2021. Dowker was carrying out some maintenance on the Yankee Sunshine, one of the boats belonging to her tour company, Nautical North Family Adventures. But cleaning this 28-person vessel was no ordinary task. The bottom of the craft is made from glass, allowing passengers a clear view of the waters below. Or, in this case, a clear view of the river's secrets.

Over time, these glass windows inevitably get dirty, so Dowker has to go beneath the surface to give them a clean. Never one to shy away from a chore, she donned scuba diving gear and plunged into the Cheboygan River. And it was there, at a depth of 10 feet, that she spotted a green glass bottle resting at the bottom of the river.

According to CNN, Dowker has made a habit of collecting the discarded objects that she stumbles upon during her diving trips. At first, then, this discovery must not have seemed particularly out of the ordinary. But when the adventurer took a closer look at her new find, she realized that this was something special.

“At first I thought it was just a cool bottle,” Dowker told CNN in June 2021, “and then when I picked it up, when I was still under the water, I could read the word ‘this’ in the paper. It was kind of like, ‘Holy smokes! We’ve got a message in a bottle here. Cool!’” Intrigued, she brought the find to the surface for closer examination.

As Dowker emerged from the water, she shouted out to her first mate Rob Hemmer, who is also employed by a local history museum. Speaking to The Washington Post in June 2021, Dowker explained, “I hollered, ‘Grab my phone and snap a picture — I just found a message in a bottle!’” She was undoubtedly eager find out what was inside.

At first, though, the pair were unsure whether or not the note would be salvageable. After all, the bottle was mostly filled with water, and it was clear that the seal had seen better days. But, after some consideration, Hemmer used a jackknife to remove the cork and empty the liquid — retrieving the soaking letter from inside.

Astonishingly, the note was signed with the date November 1926 — nearly a century before Dowker’s discovery of it. So the author was almost certainly no longer alive. But perhaps some of his descendants could be located? While Hemmer took the find home and placed it in the freezer for safekeeping, his co-worker decided to turn detective. After all, she reasoned, there were still some Morrows living in Cheboygan in 2021. 

The day after the discovery, Dowker uploaded a post to her company’s Facebook page. It read, “So look what I found while washing windows (and cruising along with the fish)... any Morrows out there know a George Morrow that would’ve written this circa 1926?” The best Dowker could hope for was that her message would make its way around the local community and maybe jog some memories. 

The next day, though, Dowker was in for a shock. By the time she woke on the morning of June 20, her post about the message in a bottle had gone viral. To date, it has been shared over 100,000 times. Speaking to CNN, she said, “What was going through my mind was, ‘Where am I even going to find the time to do the research to find the person?’”

Luckily, Dowker needn’t have worried. Because people weren’t just sharing her Facebook post — they were actively offering to help as well. Using a combination of family knowledge and internet sleuthing, several commenters began adding their own suggestions about who the note’s author might have been. Then one woman hit the jackpot.

“I FOUND THE DAUGHTER!” René Szatkowski wrote in excited capitals under Dowker’s original post. “They do not have Facebook… she is ecstatic.” Apparently, the eagle-eyed user had used Morrow’s obituary to track down one of his surviving relatives. Now 74 years old, Michele Primeau was living in Farmington Hills — some 250 miles south of where the bottle was found.

“I called her and started off the conversation with, ‘You don’t know me and this may be really strange, but there are people looking for you on the internet,’” Szatowski told The Washington Post. She then explained why she felt compelled to help, adding, “I know that I would cherish something like that from my own family’s past.”

Shown a photograph of the note, Primeau was able to confirm that it was her father’s handwriting — even though she was born two decades after it had been penned. And according to The Washington Post, she also explained that sending a message in a bottle was exactly the sort of thing that Morrow would have done. 

“My dad was really sentimental, and I could see him doing something like that,” Primeau said. “When we were kids we went camping at Lake Huron, I remember he did the same thing once. He put a note in a bottle and he threw it in the lake.” And when she saw the date on Dowker’s letter, she was even more convinced.

Despite the damage to the note, it turned out that it was still perfectly legible. It contained a name and a date — as well as instructions to whoever might discover it. The letter read, “Will the person who finds this bottle return this paper to George Morrow, Cheboygan, Michigan, and tell where it was found?” For Primeau, this note was more than a cool artifact.

“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 said. Sadly, Morrow himself died at the age of 85 some 25 years before his note was discovered. But thanks to Dowker’s discovery, his story has been brought back to life — and what an interesting life it was!

Primeau, a retired teacher, told The Washington Post that her father had gone on to live a long and varied life after writing the note as a young man. Less than 20 years later, in fact, he was on the battlefields of World War II, helping to repel the Axis forces from western Europe. And as a veteran of Normandy, he had played an important part in the eventual Allied victory.

As the note implied, Primeau explained, her father did indeed grow up in Cheboygan. But later he and his wife, AnnEss, relocated to Pontiac just north of Detroit, MI, where they raised their two children. Apparently, the couple had quite different personalities — and Morrow might well have been embarrassed if he'd known how popular his message in a bottle would become.

“My mom was an extreme extrovert, while my dad was quiet and laid-back,” Primeau explained. “He didn’t like a lot of attention, so he’d probably want to go into hiding if he were here and knew the story about his note in a bottle had gone all over the world.” But despite his reserved nature, she says, Morrow had always been playful.

“Every year, on the anniversary that he met my mother, he would call her on the phone and ask if she’d like to go on a date,” Primeau recalled. “I guess I shouldn’t really be surprised that a note he’d rolled up in a bottle would turn up after 95 years.” And if Dowker’s discovery wasn’t magical enough already, the story also played out on a very significant date.

“So he’s been gone a long time,” Primeau said of her father in an interview with CNN, “but it was kind of cool because all this happened on Father’s Day weekend.” So what of the note — and bottle — that caused all the fuss? According to The Washington Post, Dowker had originally planned to send her find to Morrow’s daughter to keep as a memento.

But Primeau had other ideas. Speaking to CNN, she said, “I thought the right thing to do would be to give it to [Dowker]. She found it and that would keep my dad’s name living on.” At the time, she planned to send a photograph of Morrow to Cheboygan, where it would be kept alongside the 95-year-old note. 

Dowker also told CNN in 2021 that she hoped to frame both the photograph and the note and put them on display. In this way, visitors to the Yankee Sunshine and Nautical North for years to come would be able to see this piece of history up close. And one day, Primeau herself hoped to be among those visitors... and she really would.

Dowker had already told The Washington Post that when Primeau finally makes it to Cheboygan to see the note, she could be sure of a warm welcome. The captain explained, “I told Michele that she now has a lifetime boat pass. Anytime she’d like, I’ll take her out on the water. She’s thinking she’ll come out in September, and I’d love to take her on one of my shipwreck tours.” And that's exactly what happened.

On September 17, 2021, Dowker updated the Nautical North Family Adventures Facebook page with some delightful news — and pictures. "George Morrow’s daughter Michelle came for a visit on Monday!" the message read. Primeau actually drove for five hours to make her visit to the now-framed message in a bottle. But she also brought a little surprise of her own.

"As it turns out, George Morrow’s journal was the most interesting read I’ve ever encountered!" Dowker wrote on Facebook. Morrow had written in the diary during his time fighting in World War II — and it was clear to all those involved that the writing matched that of the message in the bottle. "It's like I found a lost treasure," Dowker told Inside Edition.

Stories such as Dowker and Primeau’s continue to capture the imagination, of course. And for the woman who lost her father more than 25 years ago, this message in a bottle has no doubt provided an unexpected opportunity to connect with the past. What other treasures, we wonder, might be out there waiting to be discovered?

Well, Candy and Jim Duke are on the Padre National Island Seashore on most Saturdays — and on one particular day, something unusual caught their gaze. Typically, the Corpus Christi, Texas-based pair spend that day perusing the sand along the beach. And these expeditions reward the couple with natural treasures – such as sea glass, for instance. The bottles they pick up along the way are handy for decorating their backyard fence, too. But one bottle had a revealing message inside.

This time, you see, Candy and Jim had happened upon an unexpected gem. Then, after picking up the bottle and taking it home, the two decided to broadcast the moment they finally read the message – enabling their nearest and dearest to revel in their surprise.

Yes, Candy and Jim have often shared their coastal findings with their Facebook friends. On January 19, 2019, they felt, however, that they had something unique to present to their followers. So, the Dukes went on Facebook Live to reveal the object that had caught their eye that morning.

As soon as she started broadcasting on the social media site, Sandy explained her reason for doing so. She said, “We went to the beach today, and, as usual, we always find wonderful treasures... Today, we found a bottle that has a message in it, [and] so we decided to go on [Facebook] Live to open it.”

At that point, Candy and Jim knew very little about the bottle they had uncovered. Nonetheless, Candy showed the item to the camera and described it as best she could, saying, “The bottle’s just a standard, old, white bottle. It has a cork in the top.” Perhaps the most compelling visual detail, however, were the instructions visible from the outside.

As Candy read aloud, the container had an outward-facing message that read “Break bottle.” But the beachcombing couple didn’t want to do that, given their penchant for displaying what they uncovered. Candy explained, “We collect the bottles from the beach, and we have them going down Jim’s fence in the backyard.”

Then Candy and Jim examined the bottle and all of its outward-facing details before cracking it open. They also shared that there was a number inscribed on the receptacle: one that read 002338. This, along with the “break bottle” instructions, had understandably “sparked [the couple’s] curiosity,” according to Candy. She went on, “We just wanted to be able to share with all of you who follow us and all of our... treasures that we find.”

With that, Candy added, “I’m going to let Jim open this little treasure.” So, she handed the bottle over to her husband, who had brought a wine bottle opener. Using this tool made sense considering that the container had been corked and closed. But breaching the bottle wouldn’t be as straightforward as it may have seemed at first.

To begin with, Jim tried to pierce the cork by twisting the corkscrew. Ultimately, though, he felt as though the stopper might be “broken or something,” as it barely budged. Then he realized that it was made of “hard rubber” – a much different material to the traditional soft cork that plugs wine bottles.

So, Candy suggested to Jim, “Maybe you need to stand up and put pressure behind it.” But rising from his seat did little to help Jim get the wine bottle opener to work. To no avail, he twisted the tool all the way into the rubber stopper and started to press down on the wings – a move that would normally release the cork.

When the stopper remained in position, however, Jim came up with a second plan of attack. Explaining his new idea, he said that he would “twist [the wine opener] some more” to see if he could pull the cork out himself. This method proved somewhat successful, too, as pieces of the cork started to break off – although most stayed firmly in place.

At that point, Cindy stated the obvious, saying, “Well, this is harder than we thought.” Even so, she and Jim decided to “keep going with it,” and he re-twisted the corkscrew once again. As Jim worked to open the bottle, his wife joked, “Thank goodness there’s no wine in there. We’d all be crying at this point.”

Fortunately, the couple had yet another tool up their sleeve. Candy introduced what she described as “a handy, dandy antique ice pick,” with Jim ditching the opener to try to remove the remainder of the cork with the long, thin tool. And as her husband worked, Candy seemed to realize why the bottle contained such clear instructions.

The Texan mused, “Maybe that’s why they say break the bottle, because they sealed it really good.” Within less than half a minute, though, she and Jim would finally thwart the hard, rubber cork. Yes, as Jim manipulated the stopper with the ice pick, it started to move. And as victory finally seemed to be within his reach, he exclaimed, “By George, it’s coming!”

Of course, taking out the cork was only half the battle. Candy and Jim would also have to get the letter from the bottle – and doing so through the thin neck of the container would be tough. Jim explained, “They squeezed [the message] down when they put it in, and that put it all the way” into the bottle.

Still, Jim had a game plan: he would pull the papers close enough to “where [he could] get them with tweezers.” And as he worked, Candy began to speculate what the message could possibly have to say. She even grew excited as she imagined the possibilities for her and her husband.

And while Candy’s prediction was a little far-fetched, it wasn’t completely beyond the realms of possibility. She said, “I keep thinking [that] because [the bottle] has a number on it... Maybe we won some grand prize at someplace. Maybe a cruise, I don’t know. I like to think crazy things, but you never know what you’re going to find.”

In response, Jim joked that a south Texas message in a bottle would probably only reward them with “a free taco somewhere.” But, of course, the only way to find out was to retrieve the roll of paper. And Candy wanted her turn at trying to remove the contents.

At first, Candy utilized the ice pick in an attempt to pull the documents closer to the neck of the bottle. Jim suggested she then try the tweezers to get the paper all the way out. But unfortunately for the pair, the tiny pincers ripped a piece off the message. And while watching his wife’s efforts, Jim quipped, “You can see this is not staged.”

Then, at nearly nine minutes into the video – and with still no letter in hand – Candy wondered if the message in the bottle would be “worth all of this.” But the beachcomber spoke too soon, as just seconds after she made that statement, the letter started to give way. She slowly slid it out of the neck of the bottle, finding the paper to be “really, really thick.”

Then, finally, Candy unfurled the message in the bottle and read it aloud to her Facebook Live audience. And at first glance, she noticed that the letter had a space for her to reply. She described, “It has a date, place found, your name and your address, and it has the number on it.”

Next, Candy got to the contents of the message. This read, “Important: this bottle is one of a series released at known locations in the Gulf of Mexico by scientists from the Galveston Botanical Laboratories of the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries.” Naturally, though, a government agency wasn’t releasing bottles into the water just for fun.

The letter clarified the purpose of the experiment, saying, “These releases are part of a study to determine the role that water currents play in the movement of young shrimp from offshore spawning grounds to in-shore nursery grounds.” And as Galveston Botanical Laboratories wanted to know where the bottle had ended up, this explained the spots for the finder to fill in their personal information.

Then Candy chuckled when she read the end of the message, as it revealed the value of the treasure she had found on the beach. The letter concluded, “The person finding this bottle should complete the enclosed postcard and mail it at the first opportunity. A 50-cent reward will be sent for each completed return.”

So, while there may not have been a fortune in store for the Dukes, Candy nevertheless had exciting news to share after the broadcast had ended. She revealed in a comment made underneath the video that she had received “a very exciting call about the bottle.” This contact, as it turned out, had been from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The NOAA had taken the place of the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries – the organization responsible for the message that Candy and Jim had found. And employees at the agency knew precisely when – and how many – bottles had once been sent out into the sea.

A February 2019 article on the NOAA website explained that Candy and Jim’s bottle had been one of 7,863 that had been deployed in the northwestern corner of the Gulf of Mexico. And, astonishingly, the containers had been released between February 1962 and December 1963 – meaning the Corpus Christi couple had found their example more than 50 years after the experiment had been initiated.

In the intervening years, the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries had become the NOAA – although the agency’s offices remained in Galveston. And in 2019 current acting lab director Matthew Johnson revealed to CNN why the 1960s team had wanted to understand shrimp spawning in the area.

Johnson said, “At the time, the shrimp fishery was the largest in the Gulf of Mexico, and this was the first attempt to start managing the species.” He explained, too, that modern fishermen still use what they know about water currents and shrimp nursing grounds to set their harvesting quotas.

And for many years, the message-in-a-bottle technique proved the best way for fishermen to track ocean currents. Decades after these containers are set to sea, then, they continue to wash up on shore. Candy and Jim aren’t the only ones to have discovered such an example, either.

Back in 2013, for example, a man found a scientific message in a bottle on the idyllic coast along Martha’s Vineyard. And the letter inside indicated that the item was a key part of a study by the Coast and Geodetic Survey, which had been using glass bottles to trace ocean currents since the mid-19th century.

The Coast and Geodetic Survey launched its last set of bottles in 1966, when Lyndon B. Johnson served as President and The Beatles’ John Lennon declared the group “more popular than Jesus.” Yet one container remained at sea for 47 years after that, ultimately washing up 300 miles away from its point of deployment on the Aleutian Islands – which dot the northern Pacific Ocean between Alaska and Russia.

Nowadays, experts use different methods for harvesting the same data. According to Johnson, the NOAA and other organizations today rely on drifter buoys. These also bob freely through the ocean, although they come equipped with satellite or radio equipment so that scientists can instantaneously check in from their onshore labs.

And researchers can oversee more than just the buoys’ natural drift through the ocean’s currents. These high-tech devices track everything from water salinity to wave height, and they can be customized at will depending on the information needed.

Yet despite the progress made in this area, glass bottles of a bygone scientific era still float around the ocean. And in Candy and Jim’s case, their container came with a letter and clear-cut instructions on what to do with it once discovered. So, the couple followed the directives included in the bottle that they carefully opened in January 2019.

Yes, more than 50 years after the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries experiment commenced, Candy and Jim returned the postcard that came with their message in a bottle. They filled out the required information – their names, their address and the place where they found the glass container – before sending the form back to NOAA via snail mail.

But were the couple the only ones to comply with these instructions? It appears not. You see, the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries recovered approximately 12 percent – or around 940 – of the containers within a month of them being launched back in the ’60s.

And, of course, the bottle came with a reward, according to the enclosed letter. This promise was honored by NOAA, although Candy and Jim wouldn’t receive a large sum of money in exchange. They wouldn’t be heading off on a cruise, either.

Instead, as Johnson later revealed, he offered the Dukes the original half-dollar prize, which would cost 55 cents to ship and $3 to print on a convenience check. But the couple may not have been too bothered with this meager sum. After all, Candy had labeled the one-of-a-kind find a “wonderful treasure” before she opened it.