wfgodot
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Message in a bottle: Note written by Detroit girls surfaces a century later .(freep.com)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...e-trying-track-relatives-people-wrote-it.html
much more at the link, and more pictures here:Nearly a century ago, Selina Pramstaller, 17, and Tillie Esper, 21, of Detroit, wrote a simple note as they enjoyed a day at a popular amusement park on Harsens Island.
“Having a good time at Tashmoo,” their message states in neat cursive writing.
They stuffed the message in a bottle, corked it and threw it in the waters of the St. Clair River, where it sank to the bottom.
There it laid for 97 years waiting to be discovered.
That’s what happened last June, when diver Dave Leander found the bottle. It was tucked in 4 to 6 inches of dirt in about 30 feet of water near where the Tashmoo steamship once docked daily, ferrying passengers to Tashmoo Park on Harsens Island at the northern end of Lake St. Clair.
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Diver Michael Brodzik said the bottle “pretty much sunk where they threw it” because it wasn’t buoyant enough to float. He said the clear bottle would have held cherries or olives. There was a little air in the bottle when it was found, a touch of dampness, with part of the paper sticking to bottle, he said.
Brodzik and his identical twin brother, Joe, and sister-in-law, Jenni did genealogy searches on the message writers by combing through city directories and census records. They found when the writers were born, their parents, their marriages and their occupations.
Now, Bernard Licata, president of the Harsens Island St. Clair Flats Historical Society, said, he’s hoping to locate descendants to invite to the society's celebration of a time when their relatives would have visited the island.
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...e-trying-track-relatives-people-wrote-it.html