It's a 400-year-old North Carolina mystery that may soon be solved.
Historians call it The Lost Colony. It's a group of people who disappeared from Roanoke Island between 1587 and 1590.
A map from that time may hold clues to what happened to the the Lost Colony of about 100 English Settlers.
The map is the work of John White, a colonist who returned to England and found the deserted colony when he came back to the US. White is also the grandfather of Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas.
Researchers think the settlers may have moved about 50 miles Bertie County. They think that because they discovered invisible ink on the map!
"This is the first solid clue that searchers for the colonists of the Roanoke Colony have had in 400 years," said Brent Lane, the Director of the UNC Center for Competitive Economies.
Here's how they discovered the ink: The map contained two patches, but no one thought to look under them until recently.
That's when researchers discovered the invisible ink.
"It turned out that it concealed a large symbol consistent with the sort of forts that were being built," said Lane.
With that, researchers now believe the area in Bertie County was likely the site for a second colony.
So why was it written in invisible ink? English pioneers were trying to hide their location from the Spanish because the countries were at war at the time.
WRAL