The Actual Journals

Dear Readers:  I would like to interrupt John Barker's writing just for this post to explain a few things about this journal, and I have included photos of one of the journals so you can see what I mean...

Just above, you will see the outside of one of the last Journals that John wrote in.  This is a Blueline 790 office standard journal, some of the older journals are black with red binding.  They used to be used in offices for various record keeping tasks and were available for purchase in stationary stores.  We believe though that the earlier journals were re-written from scribblers or other papers, at some point John rewrote his early writings so they would be in the same type of book as later ones.  This last journal was purchased at Woolco and cost $4.75 (the price tag is still inside)
Because John liked statistics here are just a few to do with his journal keeping
Number of Journal Books - 23
Number of Pages in total - 5089

In each journal on the first page he kept a list of entries and what page months, or days were appearing on.

For those of you who have never seen the inside of the journals here are a couple of full page views.

John wrote in various coloured pens, he used a different colour every month, Green, Blue, Black and Red.  He filled every line of every page of every book, except the last book which ended at page 5089 but there being pages numbered to 5126, 37 pages short.

The last photo is more of a close-up of his writing of one day.  We have been asked about posting certain things on certain dates, now you must understand firstly that the handwriting is quite difficult to read.  Second there is very little punctuation and alot of spelling variants.  Because this is a personal journal we do not take it upon ourselves to correct John's, sentence form, his spelling or his punctuation or whether or not he uses capital letters in appropriate places, we endeavour to type the written words exactly as they were put on the pages.

As you can see, the penmanship makes it often difficult to decifer and both of us work to the best we are able to include everything written for each day.  If there is something that you want to read or have copied again, you can come and take the time to type out or photo copy the pages that you desire, using your own laptop and photo equipment.   It does take about 20 minutes to half an hour to type and check each day that John wrote, so based on that it takes about 3 hours to type out 1 week of his words.  Susan has spent alot of hours deciphering and transcribing what you see from these journals.

We hope that we have explained some FAQ's for you.  

If you are so inclined, and have a legitimate family connection, we can allow personal visits to see the journals according to mutually acceptable schedules.  We live about 60 kms east of Vancouver, BC so contact us if you are interested.

Sincerely Chris and Susan