Republishing public domain work by family ancestors

Both my husband's great grandfather and, on my side, my own great-great grandfather were published authors. Their books appear on the Bibliobazaar/Open Source sites. Although we are direct descendants, we are not heirs or executors of an estate (as far as we know) in either case.

If we republish our ancestors' work with annotations and/or different illustrations (probably copyright-free images, if we can find any suitable ones) and physically retype the manuscripts, is that legal and then would the copyright for this edition be ours? Could we then set up an estate of this collection of family work for our own children? Would it be best to set up a small publishing company (ie through Lightning Source) to do this? Or would it be better to self publish via something like Create Space? Do we need to get permission from either Bibliobazaar or Open Source.

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Republishing public domain work by family ancestors

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