Can I recover lost messages and notes from an Iphone 4?

My (beautiful) brother died unexpectedly at the age of 29 last September…
unfortunately he had password protected his Iphone 4 and we could not get into it
the apple store told us that there was no possible way to get into the phone uless we reset it (which would cause the loss of all of his text messages, notes, etc inside the phone)
but of course there was no other way as we were never going to know his password, so we reset the phone, and we lost of his text messages and other personal things that we really wanted to keep and read in his memory
is there ANY way we can get these back?

If you can't get the phone open you can't transfer them while locked but I seen on YouTube that on a certain firmware you can bypass the lock screen by some kind of sequence using the emergency call menu from your lock screen… I hope this help and I'm sorry to hear about your loss.