‘Do not read! Private!’ Little girl’s secret notebooks lost — and found — 37 years later

Nick Gunz knew it was a long-shot when he posted on Twitter hoping to track down the owner of a pair of secret notebooks discovered in a crawl space of his parent’s Etobicoke house.

The notebooks, dated 1983, belonged to a then-9-year-old girl named Alison Jenkins and one was labelled with clear instructions: “Do not read! Private!”

Gunz said he heeded that warning as he set out to find the author.

“I looked at them and rapidly realized that these things were somebody’s top-secret notebooks from the past, which I didn’t want to pry into,” he said. “But I thought, oh, maybe there’s a chance of finding the person.”

The only information Gunz had to go on was the address of his parents’ house on Orchard Crescent and Alison’s name and age, so he turned to social media to try to solve the mystery.

The old notebooks had been discovered by contractors putting in insulation into the crawl space beneath the roof of Gunz’s parents’ house. His parents thought he’d be interested in them, as he’s a naval and intelligence historian and part-time lecturer at the University of Toronto.

Gunz, 41, took the journals home and put them on a shelf and soon forgot about them before stumbling upon them again on Christmas Eve.

On a whim, he took a photograph of one of the notebooks and posted it on Twitter. That sparked some initial interactions with friends, who thought it was interesting.

It wasn’t until Saturday night that he saw the post gain traction and thousands of people joining him in the search to find Jenkins.

“I think what happened was one of my friends posted it to a bunch of people and all of a sudden people started looking at it, replying, and coming up with suggestions,” Gunz said.

Meanwhile, 4,000 kilometres away, in Vancouver, Alison Jenkins awoke on Sunday morning to a bunch of Facebook messages from strangers asking her, “Is this you. Click on this link.”

“I had a whole bunch of Facebook messages and I thought it was spam,” Jenkins said. “I was like, this is very suspicious so I didn’t click on any of the links but I googled it because I recognized the house right away.”

It was the house she had lived in before moving to Vancouver in 1988.

As a kid, Jenkins was really fond of writing diaries, and was a big fan of the children’s novel Harriet the Spy. She always had blank books as a kid and believes the notebooks Gunz found had been Christmas gifts.

Jenkins still has other diaries from when she was young, and sometimes reads them to her boyfriend to make him laugh, but doesn’t remember much about leaving the notebooks discovered in her old home.

“I must have either thought that would be a good place to hide from my brother so that he wouldn’t read them. That was probably the thinking,” Jenkins said. “I would imagine that I was hiding it from my little brother, and I probably forgot them when I moved.”

Gunz now plans to put the notebooks in a padded envelope and ship them to Jenkins.

“It’s been a delightful bit of fun. It’s a pretty grim time overall (right now), and it’s just been a delightful little thing to happen,” Gunz said. “It feels like a little gift to be able to restore to somebody their piece of history.”

Jenkins and Gunz were in touch through email on Sunday and Jenkins sent him photos of what the house used to look like when she was a kid.

As it turned out, Jenkins and Gunz had more than the house in common. Both attended the same school as kids — Islington Junior Middle School.

Jenkins, who is now 46, teaches music at the Sarah McLachlan School of Music, which is an after-school program for kids. She works in professional theatre as an actor, musician and music director as well.

In her spare time, she is a singer and songwriter with over 40 videos on her YouTube channel.

“You get so used to bad news, and to have something nice like this happen with such lovely people that were nice enough to try to track me down and not even read the diaries,” Jenkins said.

“I said to Nick, there’s no way I would’ve been that nice, I totally would’ve read those diaries if I found them,” she laughed.