To your right is a picture of the old Thomas Morgan portrait as it was when it was found in Idaho in the summer of 2001. This priceless and irreplaceable old portrait was very nearly lost but enough of it survived so that it could be restored.

James Morgan brought it to home to Manhattan with him in September, 2001, so he could restore it. James was making jokes about Thomas Morgan visiting the big city when he arrived and three days later the terrorist attacks occurred on the World Trade Center Buildings about a mile or so down the street from him. Fortunately, Thomas not only survived the ravages of time, but also survived the September 11 attacks!

This portrait is 16 inches by 20 inches in size. It is paper glued to canvas and the canvas is mounted on a wood frame. It appears to have been originally mounted in a larger, decorative, frame which has been lost.

Thomas Morgan Revived Photograph

Here is the story of how we happen to have this wonderful old portrait of Thomas Morgan

To your left is the restored portrait.

As you can see from the top photograph, the original portrait is badly damaged and pieces of it are missing. The first step in restoring it was to have one of the best photography studios in New York City make a digital negative of it and burn the digital image onto a CD.

James then put the CD in one of his powerful Macintosh Graphics Workstations, copied the digital image onto his hard drive, opened it in Photoshop, and began to rebuild it. Photoshop is a graphics program that allows the user to change the digital pixels that the photograph is made of. Horray James!

First he removed the cracks and tears by moving good colors and textures over the damaged areas. Then he filled in the missing parts the same way. And then he lightened and smoothed the background. The final step was to adjust the colors. And then the digital restoration was burned to another CD. This CD is a digital negative from which a 16 inch by 20 inch portrait can be printed.
He considers Thomas Morgan to be the Patron Saint of our Morgan family in America because he was the one who established our family in America. He has a large (16" X 20") portrait of him on his wall like family members tradionally did in the old days.