Restoring some Case knives

[ahenry]

I have a friend who owns an extensive collection of Case knives. Years ago he was the owner of a store (sort of a general store) that suffered some fire damage and all the knives he had in the store at the time were ruined. At any rate he saved the ruined knives for some reason and over the Christmas holidays he showed them to me. I am still pretty much a newbie to knife building, but I have another friend who has been building knives for many years so I figure with his help I can restore these knives. Anyway my question is, should I make a big effort to use authentic handle material (attempting an actual reconstruction) or just pick what I want to use and forget about what these knives might have originally used for handles? If the consensus is to attempt to replicate the originals how would I go about determining what the original material was? Any help would be great.