Jack Fallin wrote: >>> I've recently completed transcriptions of some 76 pieces of Civil War-era correspondence. I know that many of you have passed through the transcription jungle, so I thought I'd ask if anyone else has encountered the method of dealing with the personal pronoun 'I" that many of these letters exhibited. Basically, the first use of "I" would be capitalized, but after that it was always a lower-case "i." The "i" s outweighed the "I"s by a ton (driving the erstwhile transcriber nuts because WORD automatically switches it to upper-case). It's possible that this usage may have been idiosynchratic to one family or to a specific area, hence my question whether anyone else has seen a similar phenomenon. _____________________ Jack, I can't say that I (or, should that be "i"?) remember having seen that use before, but check out this article, "Me, Myself and I," that ran in The New York Times a couple years ago. >> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03wwln-guestsafire-t.html. Maybe we should follow the small "i" example of your Civil War writers!! In the letters you transcribed, does the small "i" use show up in the letters of more than one of the writers? If so, were the writers related somehow? Did you notice any other capitalization quirks in the letters? It might be interesting to try to find written material from the same writers from some years after the War to see if the trait was continued. dave k