A FAMILY has been reunited with a long-lost Canadian cousin thanks to The Northern Echo.

Ron Bell has come to Darlington with his wife Carol to meet his relatives, a year after he managed to track them down through the newspaper.

He had tried to get in touch with his late mother's family in the town via the Internet, without success.

When his mother, Betty Jopling, moved to Canada to be a governess for a surgeon's family, she met and married Clayton Bell and ended up staying there.

Ron's wife remembered his mother had returned to Darlington in the 1960s for a family reunion, which had featured in The Northern Echo's former sister paper, The Evening Dispatch.

Using the newspaper cutting his mother had given him, Ron managed to get in touch with The Northern Echo and placed an article stating he was looking for his family.

He was thrilled when his cousin Ann Abell got in touch, and since then they have kept in contact via email, planning his two-week visit.

"I want to meet as many relatives as I can," said Ron.

He has already had a tour of Darlington, met his 92-year-old uncle, Albert Jopling, and visited Albert Hill, where his mother was born, as well as North Park cemetery, where some of his relatives are buried.

"It was very moving for me. I'm just sorry I left it for so long before coming here," he said.

"When my mother passed away I had no idea what had happened to her address book and had no way of getting in touch with anyone, so it is down to the kind efforts of the staff at the newspaper that got this rolling for me."

Ron and his family all met up for the first time at the Brinkburn pub last night.