A time machine.
Whatever terms you need. I could stay invisible like a ghost so I can’t change anything, for example.
I’d like to be able to see first hand what was happening in some of these families so I could answer some questions.
Did Betty have an affair, or was she raped? Did she already have a husband who left her over the incident?
Was John’s family really from Canada? Did they change their name? Were they on the run from the law? Or the mob?
And a typewriter.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have records you could actually read? I wish the typewriter had been invented a few centuries earlier.