But Carlina was also, during those years, methodically working through the NCMEC database. She was doing it privately, apparently without telling anyone in her daily life what she was looking for or why. The logic of what she was doing is not difficult to follow: she had been told she was abandoned as an infant, but she did not believe the story fully enough to stop looking. She had no birth records. She had a face that did not resemble the people she lived among. And there was a national database of missing infants, searchable by the public, that covered the entire country.
She searched it for years before she found what she was looking for.
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## What the Age-Progression Technology Actually Does
When NCMEC produces an age-progression photograph for a long-term missing child, the process is more technically grounded and more dependent on biological relationships than popular accounts typically convey.
The starting material is whatever photograph of the missing child exists. For infants taken shortly after birth, this is usually a hospital photograph — the kind of picture taken in the first day or two of life, before the child’s features have settled into the form they will hold as they grow older. Infant features are notably non-specific: most newborns look more similar to each other than adults do, because the physical differentiation that comes with development has not yet occurred. Working from an infant photograph to project an adult face requires substantial knowledge of how facial development proceeds.
NCMEC’s forensic artists accomplish this through a combination of: