Those pesky apostrophes

They've been nothing but trouble their whole life. Oh, we manage to deal with them to indicate contractions (though only after a certain amount of doubt as to whether, for instance, it's spelled "can n't" or even "ca'n't"), but what about for the past tense when we don't pronounce the "e"? We've settled on just "adored, obeyed, opposed", but Milton wrote them differently:

Thus far his bold discourse without controll
Had audience, when among the Seraphim
Abdiel, than whom none with more zeal ador'd
The Deity, and Divine commands obey'd,
Stood up, and in a flame of zeal severe
The current of his fury thus oppos'd.
(Paradise Lost, Book V, lines 803-808)

And in possessives, though we've settled on a rule ('s for singulars or plural not ending in -S, and s' for plurals that do: dog's, men's, dogs'), we can't quite figure out what to do with some nouns - those that end in sibilants. Is it "Charles's dog" or "Charles' dog? Why did Jesus and the ancient Greeks get one usage when other, equally ancient names did not? Why is it just the names that end in the letter S, not (say) Z, when the sound of the possessive is Z? (Mind you, although the difference in spoken English is nonexistent - try guessing whether someone said dogs, dog's, or dogs' just by listening to them! - it's definitely helpful to have the orthographic clue.)

And what about that apostrophe that drives otherwise sane people (I'm assuming) into a shrieking rage? The apostrophe where it doesn't belong. You know the ones I mean:

• the "greengrocer's apostrophe" - the one that makes plurals (such as "the Smith's live next door" or "Anyone have any idea's?").
• the one that's essentially a spelling error, producing "it's" for "its" and so on ("Our project has it's own web server and it's user's are homed to it. I can't see why we would ever want to change that.").
• or the one that, bizarrely, turns up on verbs ("When checking on fonts, the X-server query's the list." or "He write's about his childhood in Havana.")

[Please note, by the way, that I did call it an error. I just don't think it's a harbinger of the Fall of Civilization.]

Anyway, confusion over exactly how and when to use the apostrophe has been going on for a very long time. And here's a strange new-to-me use, one I hadn't seen before. It's from a book called The Joss: A Reversion, written by Richard Marsh in 1901, and it's in noun-noun modification!:

Ch XXII:
That they were after something connected with Mr Benjamin Batters I had no doubt. Yet they unearthed the Batters' papers among the rest--even the Batters' bonds!--and tossed them to one side as if they contained nothing that was of interest to them.

There's no reason I can see for that apostrophe. Even if you think "Batters" has a possessive form of "Batters' " instead of "Batters's", you wouldn't be using the possessive here. Possessives are determiners, and you can't have two determiners in a phrase. "They unearthed the his papers among the rest" is clearly ungrammatical.

This is probably just another spelling error, but it's the weirdest I've seen in a long time.