Hi grandma
 ... So I copied them back - whew - with a suduski cp -r command and now they are all owned by ROOT ... 
Is that supposed to be  sudo ? If you are gonig to ask for help, 
show the commands exactly as you entered them.Frankly, I had no idea what you meant. But then again, I don't expect people to replace parts of commands with
words they made up because they think it's clever.
The command you wanted was (assuming you actually need to use sudo):
sudo cp -aYou can find out what that means just by asking:
tc@E310:~$ busybox cp --help
BusyBox v1.29.3 (2018-12-19 15:29:37 UTC) multi-call binary.
Usage: cp [OPTIONS] SOURCE... DEST
Copy SOURCE(s) to DEST
        -a      Same as -dpR
        -R,-r   Recurse
        -d,-P   Preserve symlinks (default if -R)
        -L      Follow all symlinks
        -H      Follow symlinks on command line
        -p      Preserve file attributes if possible
        -f      Overwrite
        -i      Prompt before overwrite
        -l,-s   Create (sym)links
        -T      Treat DEST as a normal file
        -u      Copy only newer files
tc@E310:~$