One Year Later, Chicago-Area Woman Continues Work To Reunite People With Items Lost In Washington Tornado
UPDATE: The owner of the letter and box featured in this story has been identified. 2:18 p.m. 11/16/14
(CBS) -- It was a year ago tomorrow when a tornado devastated the town of Washington, Illinois and a woman who'd never heard of the town before the tornado has devoted this year to helping reunite people with their lost possessions.
That Sunday a year ago, Kathy Ungaro was in Missouri and when she was driving on her way back home to the Chicago suburbs on Tuesday, she says, "My car would not allow me just to go straight home."
She felt like she had to stop in Washington to help.
"And for the entire year following, I pretty much came back to Washington every weekend and concentrated most of my time trying to get through the debris before those big old claws came and picked up everything and dumped it in a dumpster."
Podcast
She's posted most of her finds on Facebook with pictures.
"One of the most profound things that I found was a family's video bag that had nine different tapes in it: baby being born, baby's first steps, things like that. And it was amazing that, through the help of Facebook, I was able to spend the year finding items and returning them to families."
Ungaro says she has been able to reach about 100 families to reunite them with lost objects.
The objects waiting to be claimed are being kept at the Washington library. One of the unclaimed objects is a love letter that says "I miss you terribly."
"It was actually a letter in a wooden box and in the wooden box was a bunch of shells. Now how it survived and where actually it was pulled from, I'm unsure. But it was amazing."
