Historian Nick Gunz was intrigued when his parents gave him two old notebooks they found in the crawlspace of the Toronto home he grew up in.
He didn’t read them, partially out of his historian’s respect for privacy, but also because of the stern warning on the cover, which reads:
“This book is Alison’s. Do not read! Private!”
Gunz said the book also noted that it was “written by a ‘sometimes fierce spy.'”
Instead, Gunz shared his discovery on social media on Christmas Eve in the hopes that the hive mind of the internet could locate the notebooks’ rightful owner.
Soon after, Vancouver’s Alison Jenkins received several Facebook messages from strangers asking if the notebooks belonged to her.
“I thought it was some kind of scam,” she said.
She overcame her skepticism and Jenkins and Gunz exchanged emails. They quickly realized that Jenkins had at one point lived in the Toronto home where the diaries were discovered.
“I have a feeling I was probably hiding them from my younger brother and then just forgot about them,” Jenkins said.
Gunz said he is grateful that he has been able to solve the mystery of the forgotten notebooks, and has mailed them to Jenkins in Vancouver.
“She turns out to be a really cool person, which is really neat,” Gunz said.
“She’s a singer-songwriter — I tracked down her music online and it’s fantastic. It’s really kind of the best possible outcome. If you’re going to track down a mystery person, having them turn out to be somebody really cool is really neat.”