I'm not sure if Mary Brace's story is correct. It was my understanding that Jim Rowe purchased many of George Burke's negatives. Brace also worked with Burke and had many of his negatives as well.
Both would sell postcards to a collectors in the 70's and 80's. I bought hundreds if not thousands of postcards from Jim Rowe back then. I think I paid about 50 cents each. The ones from the original negatives were beautiful. I would mail them out to the old timers to get them autographed, and on several occasions the players would write me and ask where they could purchase copies of the photos. Once a former Yankee who played a few games in the 40's showed up at my house after getting a letter from me with a few photos from his playing days!
Rowe would sell 2 types of photos, those from original negatives and those that were copied from other photos. The copied photos weren't nearly as nice.
By the way...here is a quote from a 2006 SABR newsletter:
"JIM ROWE COLLECTION BEING AUCTIONED OFF
Sports Collectors Digest reports that the Lelands auction house is featuring 8,000 original George Burke negatives as well as both photos and negatives from Jim Rowe’s personal collection. The George Burke negatives are being sold in one lot. Rowe’s collection is being broken up into eight lots, with the most significant lot containing 25,000+ negatives. We can only hope that these two collections of negatives end up with buyers who will eventually make these historical items available to future researchers, but the odds probably aren’t great on that happening. Those who want to visit the Lelands website should go to
http://www.lelands.com/ The auction on the Burke and Rowe items ends on December 14th."