On this episode of Our American Stories, when the Joplin EF5 tornado struck on May 22, 2011, entire neighborhoods disappeared in seconds. But the storm took more than lives and homes. It also swept away the irreplaceable pieces of the lives lived inside them. Wedding portraits, baby pictures, and snapshots of loved ones were ripped from homes and scattered across the surrounding countryside for miles. Thad Beeler's parents survived the storm, and when he returned to their damaged home, he noticed something that changed the course of his life: their family photographs were still hanging on the walls, while their neighbors no longer had a house.

Soon, a stranger brought a photograph he had found to Beeler's church and asked a simple question: What should he do with it? That question helped inspire the National Disaster Photo Rescue, which has reunited more than 18,000 photographs with over 1,000 families from the Joplin tornado alone. Beeler shares how returning seemingly ordinary pieces of paper became a mission to give people something irreplaceable back: their memories.

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