JOPLIN, Mo. — After the storm, after friends and family are accounted for, one of the first things many tornado victims look to recover are family photos and heirlooms.

Joplin resident Robbin Harruff McPherson lost everything May 22, but a friend of her middle son’s saw a picture of him posted on a Facebook page that was set up to reunite tornado victims with lost photos. She picked it up Saturday from Abi Almandinger, of Carthage.

Almandinger said she is working with area churches that have volunteers out in the disaster zone who have gathered photos amid the debris. When they can’t find the owner, they give her a call.

She posts them on “Joplin’s Found Photos,” a Facebook site she created.

“I believe I have 30 photos I have delivered to people,” Almandinger said, as well as an additional dozen photos that have been identified and will be returned as soon as she can contact the known owners.

She has put up 267 photos on her own, and others have posted 100 or so photos on the same site.

“It’s one little picture — but it means a whole lot,” McPherson said. “It’s one little piece of my normal life I’ll have back.”

‘Lost photos of joplin’

“We always hear, ‘I can replace the house, I can replace the car, but I would give anything for the photos, my family Bible, my grandma’s quilt,’” said Angela Walters, a genealogist and preservationist from Pryor, Okla.

In the days after the tornado, Walters began her own Facebook site, “Lost Photos of Joplin Project,” which allows finders of photos to post them and owners of photos to search for them, anywhere and at any time.

“The thought of all those precious memories scattered to the wind and being lost to mold and dampness, just broke my heart,” Walters said.

Another site doing the same thing is www.joplinrescuedphotos.org.

It’s working already, tornado victims say.

Bob Tignor, a longtime area educator who had accumulated 27 years worth of photos from coaching, as well as photos of his children and his grandchildren, lost just about all of them.

“We lived at 4604 E. 20th, right next to the new East Middle School,” he said. “But of all the possessions you own, a lot of that stuff can be replaced. Human beings can’t be, and pictures really can’t either.”

Jan Kimbrough, a retired teacher, saw photos of Tignor’s that someone had found and posted on Facebook after the storm.

“It was of me and my grandkids, and it’s priceless,” Tignor said.

Harlan Snow, of Joplin, and his wife survived the tornado but lost just about everything they owned.

Their daughter, Beth Snow, who lives in Springfield, was saddened to learn that the losses included most of the family photos.

“I work in Willard and was contacted by the Willard post office regarding a found photo which had been recovered from the Robberson Prairie Cemetery in Willard,” Beth Snow said. “The postal employee recognized me from picking up work mail at the P.O. box.

“My folks now have a battered yet clear photo of my brother and me from our middle school days. I am so grateful to the unknown person who found it and turned it in.”

Willard, in Greene County, is about 60 miles from Joplin.

Lacey Stratton lost her brother, Petey, in 2008. The storm took away all of his childhood photos, too, when their mother’s home at 24th Street and Iowa Avenue was demolished.

“But someone, by the grace of God, found a photo of him in his Joplin Little League uniform, about age 7, and posted it on the ‘Lost Photos’ page on Facebook,” she said. “We have it back now.”

Restoration

In many cases, preservation and/or restoration also are needed, experts say.

Several days of rain and high humidity followed the Joplin tornado, making anything that was scattered not just damp but also muddy and moldy.

“It is about so much more than just collecting,” Walters said. “Many of these photos are damaged and need to be preserved before they are lost forever. There are several well-meaning groups collecting these photos, and it is important to get the word out about this project.”

That’s where tips provided by professionals, as well as a planned visit by Operation Photo Rescue, can help.

Operation Photo Rescue is a volunteer network of professional and amateur photographers, graphic designers, image restoration artists and others. The group’s mission is to repair photographs damaged by house fires or natural disasters at no cost to the people who own them.

This spring, the group did a run to Nashville, Tenn., after massive flooding there.

“In terms of the numbers of photos brought back, it was very successful,” said Victoria Johnson, of Springfield, a spokeswoman with the group. “We helped 60 families and came back with over 1,000 photos to be restored.”

Operation Photo Rescue will be rolling into Joplin in September, according to the group’s president, Margie Hayes, of El Dorado, Kan. It will set up an area where families affected by the tornado can take damaged photos.

“Those photographs deemed repairable will be scanned and loaded into the OPR database,” said Johnson. “They are then restored by the OPR volunteers, returned to OPR, and then printed and mailed to the families.”

The group has found that waiting a few months after a disaster brings better results; families have had more time to get settled back into their lives. The group has been in contact with representatives at Missouri Southern State University, and they have offered to help with the project.





On the Net



People may look for photos at these sites:

www.joplinrescuedphotos.org.

Lost Photos of Joplin Project on Facebook

Joplin’s Found Photos on Facebook.