THE missing pieces of a family puzzle have been found thanks to The Northern Echo.

Gill Shea, of Bishop Auckland, County Durham, had longed to find descendants of her grandmother's sister for years.

But it was only when she put her appeal in The Northern Echo's Tracer column, which aims to unite people, that she got her wish - and realised that her relative, Kath Conroy, lived only a few miles away in Ferryhill.

Gill said: "My grandmother Elizabeth had four sisters and I could trace the lines from all the others, but there was one sister, Mary, whom I knew nothing about. All I had was a photograph of the pair of them together."

Gill sent the photograph and information to The Northern Echo and it was seen by the husband of Sedgefield borough councillor Kath Conroy.

Kath immediately e-mailed Gill, before the pair met to share old photographs, swap stories from their childhoods and fill in the gaps in their respective family trees.

Kath said: "My husband thought my grandmother had come back to haunt him when he opened The Northern Echo and there she was staring out at him.

"I was over-the-moon when I saw it in the paper. It was a really lovely afternoon talking about old times."

Gill said: "We never knew what had happened to that branch of the family or where they were. Now all the pieces are more or less in place."

Spurred on by Gill's success, her husband, Alan, wrote to a newspaper in Bendigo, Australia, for information on his great-grandfather's brother, Stephen Campbell, who was a mining expert.

An Australian cousin he had never met replied in a 27-page letter and sent several photographs, including one of Mr Campbell pictured outside a mine.

Gill said: "It has been fantastic for us to fill in all the missing details."