From Hurricane Sandy's Muck, Salvaged Bits of Staten Island Lives One photo is a crackled black-and-white of a clean-shaven man in a dark uniform, smiling next to a woman in a curly brunette bob wearing what looks like nurse attire. A color photo stars a toddler wearing a frilly pink dress and a pink bow in her hair. Someone penned on the back a name - Sophia Francesca - and the reason for capturing the occasion: "1st dance recital." Another photo, undated but full of clues as to which decade it probably came from, has a man with a thick, dark mustache and sideburns side by side with a woman preening in light eye shadow and a blond, feathered, Farrah Fawcett hairdo. In the days following Hurricane Sandy last year, neighbors who had returned and an army of volunteers organized by a local State Assembly member sifted through the muck and debris in New Dorp Beach, Staten Island, for any belongings that could be salvaged. They began to develop a collection of photos - muddy, wet, scratched, stuck together - and some documents, cards and posters that grew to about 950 mementos. They are now arrayed on a Facebook page in hopes their owners might recognize and claim them. The memories on display include first communions, wedding days, family vacations, children leaning over their birthday cakes, school plays, baseball uniforms, marching bands and portraits of family dogs - life before the storm. After the hurricane passed, Steven LoBaido, 46, was clearing out the basement of his wife's family's home, which had collapsed. After hearing the raking and chatter outside, Mr. LoBaido joined the neighborhood search for belongings, and found his own wedding photo blocks away from where it had been kept in an album. "A lot of these people lost their homes," he said. That one photo of your great-grandmother or grandfather, that photo would mean the world. Mr. LoBaido, a home improvement contractor, eventually piled bags of recovered photos onto his truck and took them home. He and his wife, Stephanie, then took them to his union hall, where with other family members they spent a week cleaning and drying the photos. They returned photos to people they recognized, and helped organize a display a few months ago at New Dorp High School, but turnout was low. Another volunteer, Michelle Cocozza, 31, offered to scan all of the photos and post them online, where they can now be found on a Facebook page of the local assemblywoman, Nicole Malliotakis, who helped organize the cleanup and the recovery. "There was such a void, I felt like this was something I could do to help," said Ms. Cocozza, who lives in Dongan Hills. Assemblywoman Malliotakis hopes to do a similar project for photos recovered from the Oakwood Beach neighborhood; a separate Facebook page compiles found mementos from New Jersey. One of the New Dorp photos features a man in a navy blue jacket, his back to the camera, on bended knee as the wide-eyed woman sitting before him in a Statue of Liberty hat clasps her manicured hand over her mouth. There is a smudged photo of a smooth-haired, newborn baby, dressed in white on a snow-white blanket. There are funeral cards for people named Anna, Rosa and Giovanni. There are pictures of the Our Lady Queen of Peace School class of 1961; the commencement program for the Tottenville High School class of 1980, and a 1992 group shot of Criminal Investigator Training Class No. 215 of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Ga. On the Facebook page, comments on the recovery page run from nostalgia to surprise. "This is grandpa????" one woman posted under a faded black-and-white. Another woman posted under a photo of a girl wearing a pink dress with a big black bow: "Oh dear God.... That's up for the world to see? Ms. Malliotakis keeps the color photos in her office, stacked in categories such as: Multiple Children, 1 Child and Weddings/Ceremonies. Nearby is a box of disposable gloves for people to use when handling the photos. Besides carrying some of the storm's grainy residue, the photos also give off, collectively, a not too pleasant odor. The LoBaidos hold onto the black-and-whites, in a box in their dining room, under an old Victrola. So far, only a few of the actual photos have been reclaimed. Some of them were picked up by Vanessa Martinez after she scrolled through the online photos a few weeks ago, and came across images of her younger sister's face. They were from a collage the two had made for a poster displayed at her sister's Sweet 16. Ms. Martinez said it was the only homemade thing the two had done together. Her sister, now 18, had kept the collage in her bedroom before the storm turned their home into a dirt lot. The family has since been staying with friends in a one-bedroom apartment. "I don't know how it was possible," Ms. Martinez said of the found photos. After picking up the originals, she said, "we're going to do the poster again."