The majority of the lives of Lieutenant General of the Kuban Cossack Army, Ivan Diomidovich Popko, and the Kuban writer and ethnographer Vasily Fedorovich Zolotarenko, their scientific and creative biographies, have been comprehensively examined by historians. However, there remains one segment of their lives that, perhaps, remains the most unexplored and unknown: their childhood and adolescence. This is mainly due to the scarcity of documents covering this period. Official pa-pers provide no information about this particular stage of their friendship. Nevertheless, fragments of information about their early years have been discovered in personal documents. Bits and pieces of such valuable data were uncovered in V. F. Zolotarenko's diary and in I. D. Popko's letters, pre-served in the State Archive of the Stavropol Territory. Additionally, a letter from Stepan Ivanovich Romanovsky was found, which mentions the historian's years of study in Stavropol. This publica-tion serves as an appeal for further investigation into this intriguing matter. It is my sincere hope that researchers will unearth additional documents that will contribute to a more comprehensive under-standing of this hitherto unknown period in the lives of these truly remarkable individuals.