etymology - How did the meaning of eventually diverge from the French . . . eventually (adv ) "ultimately," 1670s, from eventual + -ly (2) the terms "eventual" and "eventually" were in use in the early 1600s and held its current meaning by the mid 1800s The etymologies point to French éventuel, but both the French word and German eventuell have very different meanings (See this Q A) How did these meanings diverge?
Eventually — in the past or by some point in the future That is a strange usage About the only way to use eventually with some form of past construction is if the person doing the sending has been long gone (dead, or in an unknown state) and the person making the statement has no way of knowing whether what was sent arrived
punctuation - Is there precedent for eventually dropping apostrophes . . . Yes, there is precedent for dropping apostrophes Lots of words we commonly use today are abbreviations of the original words Words like phone which is short for telephone, bus which is short for omnibus Originally those words were written with apostrophes in the place of the parts that were dropped So telephone was originally shortened to 'phone before being eventually shortened to phone