I read an interesting story on the BBC news this week about a family appealing for information about the sender of a message in a bottle, found in Norway.

Message found in a bottle in Norway

This appealed to the detective in me, so I began examining the records to see if I could solve the mystery. The sender’s name is hard to read in the photograph, but the article told us she was Loretta Brooks. If she was 12 in July 1996, she would have been born between August 1983 and July 1984. I searched the GRO births index on ancestry and found there was a birth of a Lorretta Christine Brooks in Q3 (Jul-Sep) 1983 in Reading and Wokingham. In 1996 the letter writer claims to be from London, but she may have moved in this time. 192.com states that there is still a Lorretta Brooks living in Reading today. This could be the answer.

However, taking a closer look at the letter, the name is spelt with a single ‘r’, whilst Lorretta Brooks in Reading is spelt with a double ‘rr’. Although I’m used to seeing people spell their names in a variety of ways within historical records, it would be quite uncommon for someone in the 1990s to be inconsistent in this. From the picture of the letter, it looks as though the original part of the letter with her name on has worn away, and the name Loretta has been written in on the previous line. This calls into question its accuracy.

Another question is raised by the grammar used. Although you might expect to see spelling mistakes from a 12 year old, such as her spelling ‘adress’ with one ‘d’, the grammatical errors, such as ‘please write on English’ and ‘I’m a girl on 12 years old’ suggest that perhaps the sender wasn’t Loretta from London at all, but someone using English as a second language – perhaps even from Norway itself?

I hope the children who found the bottle are able to solve their mystery one way or another. It’s every child’s dream to find a message in a bottle, and even if it only came from relatively close to their home, being able to track its history, like tracing a family history, would provide a great sense of closure to their story.