The Message in a Bottle

A Blog Started Twenty Years After Blogs Were Popular | By Amy Smyth

The Inlet Map

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 [...]

Captain Samuel P. Gale

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 [...]

Captain Samuel Gale: 1874

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 [...]

The bottle with the cork.

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.

I found a message in a bottle.

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.