Edith
Roller Journals |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
When the Jonestown community died on 18 November 1978, one of the silenced voices was that of Edith Roller, a 63-year-old former college professor who had joined Peoples Temple more than three years before. Professor Roller kept an extensive and detailed journal, running several thousand pages in total, during her Temple years. She went to Guyana in January 1978. Her day-to-day notations of life in Jonestown inform or corroborate much of the information located at the Jonestown Research link. The Roller journals have been found at two locations – in Temple documents collected by the FBI and released to this website through the Freedom of Information Act; and in the Peoples Temple Collection at the California Historical Society – but there are several months that are still missing. The entries have been divided by month, with active buttons leading to transcribed or typed .pdf file months. Most journals found were in written-note form. Some journals were in a final, typed format; some were partly typed, partly written. Only her typed entries are in her
final wording. Poor photo copying to the FOIA discs made some parts unreadable, as indicated by in transcribed text.
We thank Don Beck and Michael Bellefountaine for their innumerable hours
of work in compiling, transcribing, and analyzing these journals. We welcome
feedback, corrections, questions and observations from all visitors. Please
write to us at remoore@mail.sdsu.edu
with your comments.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||