Reuniting tornado victims with treasured photographs

Associated Press

CARTHAGE, Mo.

White-gloved workers line the long tables, carefully sifting through photos of proms and weddings, baby’s first day, proud soldiers in their uniforms. They gently clean off any dirt, dry rain- damaged pictures — and salvage a city’s lost treasures.

The history of Joplin, Mo., slowly is coming into focus here, one snapshot, one portrait at a time. A church room in this nearby town has been converted into collection central for more than 27,000 photos buried or blown away in the monster May tornado that left 160 dead and obliterated a third of Joplin.

Amazingly, even as 200 mph winds reduced homes to splinters, fragile photos survived. Even more incredible was where some turned up: Trees. Barns. Barbed wire fences. In Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Tennessee. And, of course, all across Missouri.

Days after the May 22 storm, Angela Walters, a genealogist in Oklahoma, noticed some of these photos on Facebook pages. Many listed bare-bones information: streets where the pictures were found, a contact phone number. Why not put all of them in one place, Walters thought, so their owners could find them? So many people had lost so much, surely they’d cherish any trace of their past.

“When a disaster happens, as soon as you hear a family is safe, the next thing you always think about is photos,” she says. “They’re irreplaceable. We can go back to the time and place and people we don’t have in front of us anymore. They’re the record of our lives.”

Walters created a Facebook page — the Lost Photos of Joplin — to post pictures found in the storm-ravaged city and far beyond. She joined forces with a similar local project, and the First Baptist Church in Carthage stepped up to help.

Volunteers at the church — about a dozen miles from Joplin — clean and dry each photo. They record anything written on the images, then number, scan and send them to Walters. She plans to post about 1,000 a week. (DVDs, letters and other personal mementoes also are being returned.)

It’s slow going. Almost 500 photos have been returned so far. For every “find,” there’s reason to celebrate.

Judy Lowe, a real-estate agent, lost everything in the twister; all that remained of her house were bathroom tiles. So finding a photo of her son, Scott, on the Facebook page “was like claiming a victory from the tornado,” she says.

“Every day you realize everything you had is gone,” Lowe explains. “You think, ‘I don’t have this or that.’ Then to get one part of your life back — it’s overwhelming. You just cry.”

The battered, orange-tinted picture shows Scott, then 2 (he’s now 8) mugging for the camera in the bathroom, pretending to be shaving with foam on his chin.

“It’s a day and a memory and a piece of time,” she says of the photo. “That’s all I have now. I don’t have a baby blanket. I don’t have his first little outfit he came home in. I don’t want you to think I’m a pack rat, but it’s honestly something that takes me back to happier times. ... Since the tornado, they’ve been few and far between.”