A number of changes occurred on the website “Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple” this summer. The most visible change is the addition of a search engine to the site. This allows visitors to use key words to search the entire site with ease, and is a tremendous help for anyone looking for specific individuals, such as family members.
We also reorganized the Jonestown Audiotape Primary Project to facilitate identification and access of tape transcripts. Links to transcripts and extended summaries now exist within the FBI tape summary documents, as well as links from summaries to transcripts, and from transcripts to summaries. Tapes are broken down by topic, with a one-line descriptor to help readers see if they’d like to read more. Finally, we added several different complete transcripts of the “death tape,” along with a commentary on the tape.
The site added 75 photographs of daily life and the ordinary people of Jonestown. They may be found here. The photographs are among the 500 which the FBI collected from the site of the tragedy in 1978.
Transcripts and photographs are all in the public domain, and may be used freely. We would, of course, appreciate credit for whatever materials you obtain from the site for your use.