The great-great-granddaughter of Theobald Wolfe Tone – Katharine (Kay) Dickason (1903–1995) – died last September [1995] in Short Hills, New Jersey, at the age of 92. Although she is survived by three daughters, eleven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren, with Kay we have lost the direct link to Tone and his immediate family.

I first met and befriended her in May 1984. We had been introduced through a helpful archivist in the Library of Congress, where I had been working on the papers of Kay's other great-great-grandfather, William Sampson, a friend of Wolfe Tone and fellow barrister.

She was waiting on the platform of Short Hills railway station, as I emerged from the New York to Hoboken commuter train. I was struck both by her elegance and her sprightliness. Small in frame, lively in movement and gesture – I found the physical resemblances between Kay (and indeed others of the family) and Tone himself somewhat unnerving. She had certainly inherited Tone's spirit of adventure. She was still skiing in her 80s and only abandoned transatlantic flights in her 90th year.

Through her father (Lascelles Chester Maxwell) and grandmother (Grace Georgiana Tone Maxwell, Tone's granddaughter), Kay had access to oral traditions directly linking her to Tone's generation. Until the last months of her life Kay possessed total clarity of mind and perfect mental recall. She knew intimately all the actors in Tone's life and talked about the detail in a way which transposed the listener to that past.

Over the years, as I researched my biography of Wolfe Tone, she welcomed me into her home and family and granted me access to the family papers and traditions. She knew those papers better than any historian. They were kept in neatly organised files in her basement library, which also contained the papers of Matilda Tone and some of her descendants. Among a number of family images on the wall was the miniature of Tone, reproduced on the dust-jacket. Kay had lent me a slide of it.