How can I recover lost secure notes in Keychain? I have been having problems is Messages.  One post suggested chucking your login.keychain.  This caused my secure notes to vanish.

Restoring this file from time machine (~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain) did not help.

In answer to comment below:

Quit Keychain Access
Renamed login.keychain
Restored from the 7:31 backup this morning.
Restored ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple/keychainaccess.plist 

Restarted Keychain Access

No secure notes.

Mac OS 10.10 Yosemite
Stupid, silly me.

The left column has a pane for Keychains and a pane for categories.

The keychain pane has 


login
local items
System
System Roots.


The Category pane has


All Items
Passwords
Secure Notes
My Certificates
Keys
Certificates.


These two are in essence multipied together.  That is, ANY of the keychains can have any of the categories.

In my wanderings I was somehow clicked into local items instead of login.  I had not created a local items secure note, so of course secure notes was blank.

Embarrassing as it is, I'm leaving this up for future klutzes.