Best and easiest photo editing software?

[Zoomschwortz]

Today we had my father's funeral and one of the relatives handed me two small boxes of glass negatives that my great grandfather had taken around 100 years ago. She said that she had a few large boxes (apple crate size) at her home and wanted to know if I was interested in copying them.

I am very interested in getting these and I scanned the 16 negatives that I got today, now I need some good editing software that will easily change these negatives into positives and will easily help me make repairs to these pictures.

I only wish that she would have come forward with these while my Dad was still alive, because he would have loved to see them and could have helped me figure out who some of the people were.

Any suggestions for photo editing software?

Thank you for your help.
Ken