Janice Wardlow Barkley

Janice Wardlow Barkley was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky on August 16, 1949, and died on January 14, 2026, in Kansas City, Missouri. She was the daughter of an Army officer and traveled all over the world. Overseas assignments included the diplomatic mission in India, occupied Japan after WWII and Europe.

She attended Congressional School in Fall Church, Virginia, Pfeiffer College in Misenheimer, North Carolina and Lynchburg College in Virginia. She graduated from Lynchburg in 1972 and took a position with Culpepper County Public Schools. In 1973, she moved back to the Washington area and took a job with the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command as a Freedom of Information release officer. She met James again on the bus on the way home from the Pentagon and the rest was history. After just one date, she went home and told her mother she had met the man she was going to marry. It took her two more years to land James.

Janice was the travel agent for the family and arranged many trips to the Caribbean Islands. On one cruise, they got to meet Cid Ceasar from the 1950s show, Your Show of Shows, and Rita Marino from West Side Story. Without her guidance, none of the family would have met these two famous folks.

She left the government and assumed the duties of caring for her adopted son, Adam Hilton Barkley. Upon retirement of her husband in 1999, they moved to Tampa, Florida for four years before moving to Kansas City, Kansas in 2005 to be near her cousin, Jo Ann. She and Jo Ann sponsored the duties of arranging Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, which helped hold the family together.

She was loved by everyone who knew her including her cousin, Jo Ann, and her two children; and many distant cousins will mourn her loss.

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