My cousin John Caldwell, who died in 2005, had known people who could remember John Morgan's Ohio raid. Talking to him was the next best thing to actual time travel. He told us about great great uncle Solomon Eversull, who had been one of the first settlers in the Ohio territory and lived to be more than 100. He told us about how his grandfather, my great grandfather, had played poker with Warren G. Harding, and kept the silver dollar he won. One night he produced the target great grandfather had hit, almost dead center, firing the openning shot of the Cincinnatti Gun Club's annual shooting match. I wonder if it was the one where Phoebe Anne Moses (who would be Annie Oakley) met her husband Frank Butler.

As a freshman in college I got to know an elderly lady who lived near my dorm. I was taking a womens' history course, and we were learning about the suffrage movement of the early twentieth century. I mentioned it to her, and she told me about going to the first meeting of the League of Women Voters and MEETING everyone I had been reading about.

But the best one I have, is something I found in a book about the Charge of the Light Brigade. The last survivor lived well into the 1920s. Either one of my parents could have spoken to him and would have remembered.