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The tornado that killed Emily Washburn’s grandfather this week also destroyed his Mississippi home, leaving his family with nothing to remember him by — until a picture of him holding the dog he loved surfaced on Facebook, posted by a woman who found it in her office parking lot, 175 miles away in Tennessee.
Like hundreds of others finding keepsakes that fell from the sky and posting photographs of them on a surreal Facebook lost and found, the woman included her email address, and Washburn wrote immediately: “That man is my granddaddy. It would mean a lot to me to have that picture.”
Created by Patty Bullion, 37, of Lester, Ala., a page on the social networking site has so far reunited dozens of storm survivors with their prized — and in some cases, only — possessions: a high school diploma that landed in a Lester front yard was traced to its owner in Tupelo, Miss., for example. A woman who lost her home in the tiny town of Phil Campbell, Ala., claimed her homemade quilt found in Athens, Ala., nearly 50 miles away: “Phil Campbell Class of 2000,” it read.
But the page is also turning social networking software designed to help friends stay in touch into an unexpected meeting ground for strangers. Along with the photographs of found items are the comments of well-wishers and homespun detectives speculating as to the identities of their owners. For those spared by the storms that ravaged large swathes of the south, the page is a bridge to its victims, a way to offer solace and to share in their suffering. “Is she okay?” wrote one commenter on a snapshot of a red-haired child at a swimming pool. “I see her face throughout the day, and wonder.”
The tornado did not touch down in Lester. But when Bullion ventured into her yard on Wednesday afternoon, she found it littered with other people’s memories the storm had disgorged in passing. One document, lying face down on the wet pavement, was a sonogram, just like those she had saved from her own pregnancies. “I would want that back,” she said.
Bullion already had her own Facebook page with a few hundred friends, but the chances of any of them knowing the people whose items she had found were slim, she thought. So she created a new page with a title that described precisely what she hoped it would contain: “Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes.” She asked her friends to post a link to it on their own pages.
“I feel like I know these people,” Bullion said. “They could so easily have been us.”
The first of the images that Bullion had posted was identified a few hours later by the sister of two children shown in a black-and-white photograph. They were from Hackleburg, Ala., the sister wrote in the comments section, a town almost 100 miles away: Bullion’s husband, a forest ranger, looked it up on a map.
By Friday evening, more than 52,000 people had clicked the “like” button on the page, and more than 600 pictures had been posted: an unopened letter, a death certificate and scores of photographs. Some of the items were unscathed. Some were carefully pieced together by their finder. Some, like mortgage statements and canceled checks, evoked calls to be sure to block out account numbers and personal financial information.
One water-damaged picture of a chubby-cheeked toddler elicited over two dozen comments, its rips and smudges an unavoidable metaphor for what people feared had happened to the child. “This breaks my heart,” wrote one commenter. A digitally restored version someone posted yielded approving comments, almost as though saving the picture could ensure the child’s safety.
Laura Mashburn saw some sign of providence in the fact that Hannah Wilson, the young woman whose photo she had found on her doorstep in Lester, turned out to work in a dentist’s office, just as she once had.
The woman’s co-workers saw the image of what looked to be her old prom picture on the page and supplied her name and address. Her mother, someone else volunteered, had a heart attack during the storm. “I saw Hannah yesterday,” wrote another friend, “and she is grateful to you for getting this back to her.”
Laura Monks, the director of a community college in Fayetteville, Tenn., who had found the picture of Washburn’s grandfather, Elvin Patterson, and his dog Yoyo, said she would return it right away.
“My great-grandfather’s name was Elvin also,” she wrote to Washburn in an email. “Is there anything that I can do for your family or your community?”
Washburn, 31, whose maternal grandmother also died in the storm, said in an interview on Friday that she would frame the photograph. Then she said, her voice breaking, “I’ll probably give it to my mom.”
