Family keepsakes from western Kentucky blown hundreds of miles into WAVE Country

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WAVE) - As thousands in western Kentucky continue to recover from the deadly tornadic outbreak, people closer to Louisville are helping them pick up the pieces.

Several family keepsakes, blown by the storms, have landed on the property of people in the Louisville area.

August Veron’s soybean farm in Corydon, Indiana became the resting place for several pictures, letters and other keepsakes blown by the tornadoes.

“It was all spread out in this bean field,” Veron said. “It’s not necessarily monetarily valuable, but it might be sentimental for someone.”

Veron found the keepsakes Saturday morning, while surveying the farm after the storms. He knew right away where they likely came from and what he needed to do with them.

So he took to social media, posting pictures of the items to Facebook. A few hours later, he came in contact with people who owned some of the pictures. They blew into his backyard from Dawson Springs, Kentucky, more than 140 miles away.

“I imagine without social media there’s no way I would ever find these people, because most of these pictures don’t have names on the back or even if they had names, unless they had a phone number, an address and everything that I would never be able to track these people down,” Veron said.

The power of social media was also apparent in the case of Katie Posten.

After the storms, Posten was walking to her car, outside her home in New Alabany, and found a piece of paper stuck to the driver’s side window.

“[I] pulled it off and flipped it over and said, ‘oh this is actually a photo.,’” Posten said.

The picture was dated 1942 and contained an image of a mother and her young son.

Posten snapped a picture of the photo and posted it to Facebook and Twitter. It went viral in a matter of hours.

Five thousand retweets later, Posten found the owners of the photo, who also live in Dawson Springs.

“Who knows if we could’ve tracked it down outside of social media,” Posten said. “I think eventually we maybe would have found it. But the reality is, it would’ve taken probably three months versus three hours.”

Posten and Veron told WAVE 3 News they are now in the process of reuniting the possessions with the families they belong to, in order to give those people what could be the only piece of home they still have left.

“If you find something and you have the means to try and get it back to the family it belongs to, you should, because you just don’t know what kind of hope that might hold,” Posten said.

A Facebook group, named ‘Quad State Tornado Found Items,’ has allowed dozens of people to reunite tornado victims with their lost possessions.

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