VILONIA, Ark. (KTHV)- Memories are special moments that tell our stories and, often, those stories are captured with pictures, but sometimes those pictures get lost.
That's the case for a lot of people in Vilonia after a tornado devastated their small town in 2014.
“We started cleaning up a home that had been blown away and we started gathering up their belongings and we found a photo and it was an infant in a little baby carrier,” teacher at Vilonia High School, Erin Rappold, said.
Rappold said they found a nearby family to whom the picture belonged.
“At the time, the mother lost it and started crying and said it was the only photo of that child they had, because the child had died shortly after she was born,” she said.
After that moment, Rappold decided she wanted to help rebuild her community, one picture, at a time.
“I thought with East we had the perfect platform to contact all of our EAST facilitators to have everyone start sending pictures they would find in fields and we started collecting them,” she said.
Rappold and her students clean the pictures, scan them, then put them online.
“Anyone can go on and look, we have a lot of community members that go online and look and recognize friends and family and contact us through the website,” she said.
The school's program started with about 90,000 pictures and now they're down to about 2,000.
Vilonia High school senior, Harlee Branson, said she sees a lot of adventure in the pictures.
“You want those memories to get back to them and you want them to be able to have that picture back. I've got a picture of a guy riding a camel and I've never ridden a camel so that's pretty cool to say that you've ridden a camel and if we find that person who owns that picture we can give them that memory back,” she said.
Branson said they have 800 pictures left to put on the website and, once they're done, she hopes every picture finds its way back home.
“It feels relieving when you've got X amount of photos uploaded on the website and you're like I did that today and now someone's memories are on there that weren't on there previously,” she said.
If you'd like to take a look at the online picture database, just in case you might recognize someone, here’s the link.