Brad Hale was getting ready to leave his house Saturday when he noticed something white in the backyard. It was a picture of an older woman, sitting in a folding chair. The back said “Ruby Tucker in Aug 1981.”
At first, the 36-year-old figured it belonged to a neighbor. But then he posted a picture in a Facebook group meant to reunite people with items blown away in last week’s tornadoes. Tucker’s great-granddaughter noticed — and Hale learned the photograph had traveled 120 miles from a storage unit in Bremen, a tiny town in Kentucky where the storms left a dozen dead.
“It’s heart-wrenching to think everyone’s lives now are scattered across the state,” said Hale, a resident of Crestwood, Ky.
The photograph was among dozens of personal items to turn up far from home in the aftermath of the tornadoes that sowed a path of destruction across six states. The Facebook group that Hale used had scores of posts by Sunday: a pillow made from a man’s button-up shirt, a birthday card, a picture of a pregnant woman with “As you can see, I’m pregnant as a pickle” written on the back.
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Photographs, by far, were the most common find. In major storms, they’re often carried the furthest, said John Knox, an associate professor of geography at the University of Georgia.
“They’re like little wings when they go up into the air,” he said.
After a historic outbreak of tornadoes slammed the South in 2011, Knox led a major study probing the trajectory of the debris. Tracking the paths of personal items posted on a Facebook page similar to the one created for the tornadoes, he and other researchers found a photograph that traveled 219 miles.
Such research is crucial in helping estimate where debris might land — especially more treacherous debris.
“We were able to make a little bit of lemonade from a whole lot of lemons and understand a little more about tornadoes, especially their aftermath,” Knox said.
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Tucker’s great-granddaughter Stephanie Burger said the photo belonged to her 84-year-old grandmother — whose Bremen home lost much of its roof. Burger does not have many pictures of Tucker and is glad to have the keepsake to pass down.
She said she knows Tucker was a “strong independent woman” who loved to play piano and grew vegetables out in the backyard — including hot peppers that Burger once made the mistake of biting into as a child.
Burger, a resident of Owensboro, Ky., said her grandma was “beaten around” in the bathroom where she took shelter and remains shaken. She was stunned to get the picture back. Burger said the sprawling online effort to return belongings exemplifies people’s overwhelming desire to “do something for the ones who have lost everything.”
“I saw the community come together in this tragic time,” she said. “Small towns, they love each other.”
Katie Posten spent Saturday morning watching her children play under the Christmas tree, grateful her family was not impacted by the tornadoes. When she went to grab something from her Subaru Forester, parked in the driveway of her Indiana home, she was stunned to find a photograph stuck to the window.
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The photo was face down, with writing on the back, leading her to think at first that someone had left a note on her car. But she turned it over, revealing an old image of a woman and a child. On the back, it read “Gertie Swatzell + J.D. Swatzell 1942.”
Share this articleShare“I was really actually overcome with emotion,” said Posten, 30, “because it was, like, all of that destruction felt really far away and then all the sudden felt really close.”
To try to reunite the photo with its owner, she posted it on Twitter and Facebook. Thousands of people retweeted her message, but it was on Facebook, where 81 people had shared her post, that she was connected with a member of the Swatzell family.
The photo had blown from a home in Dawson Springs, a town of about 2,500 people in southwestern Kentucky — more than 100 miles from Posten’s home. Many homes and buildings in Dawson Springs were leveled by the tornado. The family whose photo blew onto her car was all right, Posten said, and she plans to return it this week.
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Other pieces of debris flying around the region have shown the size of the storm that ripped through parts of the South and Midwest. Part of an Arkansas “Handbook for Safe School Transportation” was found in Kentucky. That the photo made its way to Posten’s home “from a town that was totally flattened,” landed squarely on her window and survived a downpour shortly before she walked outside, she said, “was really remarkable.”
Lynne Trotter spent a sleepless night camped in the basement with her husband and two young children Friday, refreshing an online forecast to see if the tornadoes were headed toward them.
They awoke to find little had changed at their Brandenburg, Ky., home. But there in the yard was a photograph older than Trotter — two young people smiling in front of a wall of streamers, arms around each other.
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“Prom — April 19, 1986” read the careful cursive on the back of the image.
Trotter, 34, peered at it Saturday, thinking the couple looked happy and then realizing it might belong to someone devastated by the storm. She posted it to Facebook, thinking it was a long shot but could be “just some sort of little token of what you had before.”
Within hours, the couple in the photograph had been identified and the man’s son contacted. It may have traveled 120 miles from the hard-hit town of Dawson Springs, Ky., swept up in the storm’s ferocious winds.
The son, Caleb Weaver, said he is not sure who the photo belonged to — the 21-year-old lives in Colorado Springs now. His family back in Dawson Springs are safe, he said, though his cousin is out of a job after the storms wrecked his workplace, a gas station.
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His father died of a heart attack in 2009, Weaver said. He thanked Trotter in a Facebook comment, writing that it was “really cool seeing my dad from back in the day.”
Trotter was surprised by how quickly it happened, but, living in a small town herself, said that’s how it can be: “‘Oh, this is so-and-so’s cousin,’ ” she said. “Probably enough people in that group that are from the area that they could tag people.”
She lost her father, too, about two years ago.
“Sometimes I’ll get flashes of something that reminds me of my dad,” she said, “and it’s like, ‘Whoa, that was a God moment.’ I believe that.”
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