Among the early matches was a name that would eventually prove significant: Cassidy. A first cousin named Cassidy appeared among the DNA matches, but attempts to contact this person were unsuccessful. Fitzpatrick continued working the genealogical connections, building out family trees from the matches and looking for the convergence that would point toward a specific family and a specific individual.
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## The Cassidy Connection
The genealogical work was slow. Building family trees from distant DNA matches required cross-referencing the matches against public genealogical records, identifying common ancestors, and then tracing the lines forward to find possible identity candidates — people of roughly the right age who might have disappeared around the time the woman who became Lori Kennedy left whatever her previous life had been.
The Cassidy surname kept appearing in the trees Fitzpatrick was constructing. The family connection was to the Philadelphia area — a concentration of the family in the eastern Pennsylvania suburbs that would become central to the identification.
It took approximately two years of work before Fitzpatrick identified a third cousin connected to the Cassidy family in a way that allowed the next step in the investigation. She informed Joe Velling of what she had found: a family in the Philadelphia area, the Cassidys, who appeared to be related to the unknown woman.
Velling now had a direction. He traveled to Pennsylvania.
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## The Recognition in Pennsylvania
In March 2016, Velling arrived in Pennsylvania with photographs. The photographs included images of the woman known as Lori Ruff taken from various points in her documented life — images that showed her face across the years she had spent in Texas.