Fun with Photoshop and Family History Moment

Here is an old picture of Grandpa Brown's brother, Harold Brown, that I scanned.

Here is the same picture after a little work in Adobe Photoshop. It's not perfect, but it looks better.
Isn't it a beautiful picture, though? Notice the ring on the baby's left hand. Anyway, Grandpa Brown tells a story where he mentions his brother, Harold. We have Grandpa telling the story on video at a family reunion in Alamosa in 2000. I wish you could hear him tell it, but I don't have a way of putting the video on the blog. Here's a transcription instead. He's talking about the time when their family home burned down, when Grandpa was about 16 years old. The fire started from a smoldering cigarette that Grandpa's brother-in-law had flicked into a wood box.

Roger: So he flipped it in a box that was inside the house.

Grandpa: Yes. We always had a wood box.

Grandma: Back of the cook stove. You know, they'd bring in kindling and wood and all of that.

Grandpa: My brother, Harold, was kind of a....He always had a knack for fixing up things, and he put a barrel with the pipes that went from the cook stove because it was a....They had a system for heating water, and he put the pipes into that barrel back of the stove, and...when they found that fire blazing back there he tipped that....He got through a window and went in there and tipped that barrel over on that fire, but it didn't quite put it out, and it all of a sudden got enough air that it caught in the top there and it went through the house quick.

Grandpa shared other interesting and touching details that I will not take the time to write in this blog, but the day after their home burned down, they lost Russell, Grandpa's younger brother. He had had pneumonia and had been staying in a hospital in Alamosa.