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## What the Case Demonstrates
The investigation that ended with Kimberly McLean’s identification in September 2016 was, among other things, a demonstration of how documentary and genealogical systems interact in an era when both are being transformed by technology.
The vulnerability that allowed Kimberly McLean to build a new identity in 1988 was a product of its time: a paper-based system with limited cross-referencing, organized around jurisdictions that did not communicate automatically, in which official documentation could be assembled one piece at a time without any central authority checking the whole against a comprehensive database of who existed and who had died.
The method that identified her in 2016 was also a product of its time: a digital system in which millions of people had voluntarily uploaded their genetic information to shared databases in search of ancestry information, inadvertently creating a resource that could be used to reconstruct the genealogical connections of unknown individuals.
Both the vulnerability and the solution were made possible by the specific technological context of their respective eras. The identification was accomplished not because the investigators were working with a simpler problem than the one that had stumped earlier efforts, but because they had tools — specifically, the large-scale consumer DNA databases and the analytical methods to use them — that had not existed when Joe Velling began the investigation in 2011.
The case also illustrates something about the nature of identity itself. Kimberly McLean spent twenty-two years of her adult life as Lori Erica Kennedy and then Lori Erica Ruff. She built real relationships, pursued real education, had a real child, lived in real places with real neighbors. The identity she created was, in the most practical sense, fully functional: she voted, she enrolled in college, she married, she had medical procedures performed. The people who knew her as Lori were not deceived about who she was as a person in the sense that mattered most for daily human contact; they simply did not know the name she had been born with or the family she had left behind.