Family photo from 1942 found hundreds of miles from home after being swept up in Kentucky tornado

Katie Posten discovered old sepia-toned photo stuck to her car windscreen and sought help on social media

A family photograph from the 1940s will be reunited with its owner after being picked up by a tornado in Kentucky, US, and dropped 130 miles away in Indiana.

Katie Posten, 30, a tech worker in New Albany, Indiana, walked outside her house on Saturday morning to find an old black and white photo stuck to the windscreen of her parked car.

The photo showed a woman in a striped sundress holding a little boy in her lap. A note on the back said: “Gertie Swatzell and JD Swatzell, 1942”.

Ms Posten appealed for help on Twitter and Facebook, and by Sunday she had been contacted by Cole Swatzell, who said it belonged to his family members in a small Kentucky town about 14 hours’ drive away.

Follow live updates on the Kentucky tornadoes

Dawson Springs, which has about 2,600 residents, was practically levelled by the catastrophic tornadoes that tore through six states on Friday night, killing at least 90 people.

The largest of the tornadoes left a trail of destruction over 223 miles (360km), making it the longest-ever recorded in the US, flattening towns and killing night shift workers at a candle factory and an Amazon warehouse.

Ms Posten’s home was not affected by the tornadoes, but they passed close to where she lives across the Ohio river from Louisville, Kentucky.

“Seeing the date, I realised that was likely from a home hit by a tornado,” she told the Associated Press. “How else is it going to be there?”

She said that one of the thousands of people who shared her posts was friends with Mr Swatzell and had tagged him because he had the same last name. She plans to return the photo later this week.

“It’s really remarkable,” she said. “Definitely one of those things, given all that has happened, that makes you consider how valuable things are — memories, family heirlooms, and those kinds of things.”

“It shows you the power of social media for good. It was encouraging that immediately there were tons of replies from people, looking up ancestry records, and saying ‘I know someone who knows someone and I’d like to help’.”

Kentucky’s governor Andy Beshear said on Sunday that National Guard troops were still “going door to door... rubble to rubble” searching for survivors and bodies.

“The level of devastation is unlike anything I have ever seen,” he said. “We’re still finding bodies... we’ve got cadaver dogs in towns that they shouldn’t have to be in.”