The Message in a Bottle

Thanks to this Philadelphia Inquirer article, we know Yacht Neptune was named after "this city's Neptune Club." I've been trying to determine which Neptune Club it was and who the members were, but it turns out people loved naming things "Neptune" in the late 1800s and so there were many search results. I did receive [...]

The research continues to amaze me, mainly the detailed websites created to preserve documents and information to make research like this possible. On a site dedicated to old maps, there was a map of Atlantic City from 1877, which was presumably drawn in 1876. The town was so sparsely populated that the names of the [...]

If you like reading newspaper articles from the late 1800s, you've come to the right place. And while the ultimate goal of this project is to answer: Who wrote the note and who threw the message in the bottle in the ocean remains, I'm wading through a ton of stuff that I find interesting, and [...]

The message inside the bottle has two sides: a handwritten note and a printed side. There is so much to research, so I'm breaking it down into parts, and we are starting with the handwritten note and Yacht Neptune. Research began on newspapers.com, which is seriously the most fun site I've been on in a [...]

Like you, normally, I’d find a video of a bottle with a cork in it unbelievably dull. But this is no regular bottle. This bottle is from the 1800s, and I found it on the beach in 2024. I wanted you to see it before I opened it up because it’s pretty freakin’ cool.

Unbelievably, on July 3, 2024, I found a message in a bottle on the shoreline in Ocean City, NJ, at Corsons Inlet State Park. I believe it is the oldest message in a bottle ever found. This blog is for people who like mystery, history, research, connection, and fate—basically, nerds like me.