I know what you mean. I have transcribed Civil War letters and found
the same thing. Another thing I have found that the letters were written
by different persons to the same family. Apparently the soldier had one
of his buddies write letters for him. So you end up with different
styles of hand writing. One batch of letters were written by a Civil
War soldier to his family back in IN. He died at Andersonville prison.
I donated the letters to the Andersonville Museum.

Patrick Murray
Des Moines, IA

"NO TRUTH WITHOUT PROOF"


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jack Fallin" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2010 1:33 AM
Subject: An "i" for an "I"?


> Dear All,
>
> I figure there are quite a few subscribers here who have struggled
> with transcribing old handwritten letters.  I've just emerged from
> doing transcriptions for more than 70 Civil War era letters.  A major
> part of the correspondence occurred among three brothers, their
> families and themselves.  All three followed what appears to be the
> unusual convention of avoiding all punctuation and all inital
> capitalization (they seemed to like some letters as capitals -- those
> would be capitalized wherever they were found).   In addition to not
> capitalizing letters at the beginning of sentences they would render
> the personal pronoun "I" as a capital just once, at it's first use --
> after that it was always written as "i."  I'm wondering if anyone
> else has come across this pattern.
>
> Jack Fallin
> Walnut Creek, CA
>
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