[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

***Would I be flamed too much if I express some skepticism?***

Remember when the last veterans of the Civil War died?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_surviving_United_States_war_veterans

There were people alive during the Civil War that remembered the British marching through the countryside back during the Revolutionary War.

I remember when the last White survivor of the Indian Wars died in 1973, and the same year, during the Indian problems at Wounded Knee, the news reported on a living elderly woman whose parents died at the original battle in 1890.

[x]

The last veterans of the Spanish-American War died in the 1990s. They were still around in some numbers in the 1950s and 1960s (Mad Men used that in one episode).

There's an organization -- the Sons of Spanish-American War Veterans, but by now it's probably mostly grandsons and great-grandsons.