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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