On Wednesday, the people who went to Jonestown in the hope of starting a
                  new society were remembered not just for the way their lives ended on
                  November 18, 1978.

                  On a quiet hillside, relatives of the dead, as well as a few people who
                  escaped the Jonestown Massacre, met at a mass grave for many of the cult
                  victims and remembered how they lived.

                  "The people of Jonestown went to Guyana to live, not to die," said Jynona
                  Norwood, who lost 27 relatives.

                  Norwood recalled members of her family being inspired by messages of
                  racial harmony and social justice preached by Peoples Temple leader Jim
                  Jones. Then, when stories of beatings and forced donations surfaced in the
                  press, Jones moved his church from San Francisco to the jungle.

                  "All my mother kept saying is, 'You're going to love it over there," she
                  recalled. "You're going to want to bring your son because this is going to be
                  a better place. We will build a better world.' They believed that."

                  Pipe dreams

                  At first, the utopian vision of Jones followers survived.

                  "The people in Jonestown had a vision, had a dream," Leslie Wilson said.

                   But Wilson and eight others escaped Jonestown hours before the suicides by
                   pretending to go on a picnic. Richard Clark organized the picnic because he said he had
                   lost faith in Jones.

                   "I escaped ... because I didn't go over there to die," he said. The suicide was preceded
                   by a visit from U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan, who had arrived in Jonestown to investigate complaints
                   from relatives that people were being held there against their will.

                  Some left with Ryan, but they were ambushed at a small airstrip. The
                  congressman and four others were killed.

                  Jones, knowing the deaths spelled doom for himself and his settlement, told
                  his followers that night, "To die in revolutionary suicide is to live forever."

                  They started with the babies, squirting the poison into their mouths with
                  syringes. Then the adults drank. Some protested. A few were able to escape
                  into the jungle. Some were shot to death by the armed guards ringing the
                  camp.

                  One of the survivors was Jones' son, Stephan, who was away with the camp
                  basketball team at the time of the suicide order. He recently returned to
                  Jonestown, now virtually obliterated by time.

                  "I came out of there reminded that those people had always been with me,"
                  he said. "I believe that a piece of them is with me, that I carry a piece of their
                  souls, as does everyone here."

                  Standing behind him, two young people held up a banner. On it were the
                  words that had been written on a sign that hung in the Jonestown pavilion:
                  "THOSE WHO DO NOT REMEMBER THE PAST ARE
                  CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT."

                  Looking for answers

                  But questions still linger: How and why did the 913 people die?

                  Some believe answers may lie in more than 5,000 pages of information the
                  U.S. government has kept secret.

                  "Twenty years later, it would be nice to know what went down," said J.
                  Gordon Melton, founder and director of the Institute for the Study of
                  American Religion.

                  Time to declassify?

                  Over the years, there have been rumors of CIA involvement. Some people
                  believe CIA agents were posing as members of the Peoples Temple cult to
                  gather information; others suggest the agency was conducting a mind-control
                  experiment.

                  In 1980, the House Select Committee on Intelligence determined that the
                  CIA had no advance knowledge of the mass murder-suicide. The year
                  before, the House Foreign Affairs Committee had concluded that cult leader
                  Jim Jones "suffered extreme paranoia."

                  The committee -- now known as international relations -- released a
                  782-page report, but kept more than 5,000 other pages secret.

                  Without those documents, it's hard to confirm or refute the speculations that
                  have sprung up around Jonestown, said Melton.

                  George Berdes, chief consultant to the committee at the time of the
                  investigation, told the San Francisco Chronicle the papers were classified to
                  assure sources' confidentiality, but he thinks it is time to declassify them.

                  Californian Fred Lewis lost his wife and seven children at Jonestown.

                  "I blame myself. I blame my wife," he told CNN. He also blames Jim Jones.
                  "He was a con artist all the way."

                  But don't blame the victims, said one speaker at a memorial service held
                  Tuesday at St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco.

                  "Remember the people of Jonestown, not for their horrible deaths, but for
                  who they were -- people in search of a better world."

                  Correspondent Don Knapp and The Associated Press contributed to this
                                            report.