Who owns a letter?

[3catwoman3]

6. I have a least a dozen letters written by a paternal great-grandfather...

...to his mother while he was serving in the Union army in the early years of the Civil War. I consider them quite a treasure. Some are quite faded, but the paper is in good condition. With the very faded ones I made a photocopy of each, and then made successively darker copies of the copies to render them more readable. Also, the handwritig is very elaborate and sometimes hard to decipher.

It is rather eerie to read his statements like, "We are encamped in front of the Rebels a bout one mile. We are expecting a Battle with them at any moment," or, "the Rebels lost in killing and wounded (illegible) I helped Bury about one hundred fifty of them we Buryed them all in one Grave." Also mentions of Generals Hooker and McClelland (his misspelling), and "the army of the Potomack (sic)."

What seem like typos in the above paragraph are not my errors, but exact reproduction of how he wrote things. Some of what made reading these letters difficult was variable spelling and lack of punctuation. Many sentences did not begin with a capital letter or end with a period. Words that began with a "g" or a "b" were usually capitalized, no matter where in a sentence they occurred. Those were his initials, so maybe that is why. And, he typically signed his letters with both his first and last name, even tho writing to his mother. Additionally, his penmanship was very "fluorishey" and elaborate, quite feminine looking, which was also a challenge.