Literary Rights and Copyright

This is probably an elemental question but one of my faculty raised it and I'm just not sure of the answer. In the early 1960's or late 1950's, a local person began dictating stories and ancedotes of his life to a secretary who typed these out. Our faculty member has just acquired a very large stack of these typescripts from the member of the family who did the typing. The narrator died in 1963, leaving a very large quantity of these personal life stories about his life, area businesses, ancedotes, etc. The faculty member would like to publish them but:

(1) Who has the copyright or literary rights? All of the heirs?

       (P.S. it is an extensive and large family)
(2) Do the materials fall into public domain?

Thanks.

Dean DeBolt, University of West Florida Received on Wed Sep 15 1993 - 12:58:37 GMT