Marty lost track of his brother Steve for 42 years. Then he was found

When relatives try to track down their loved ones, they may be faced with some hard truths.

- Francisco Garcia

In February 2020, Paul Parsons wrote an email to his cousin Lloyd Walford, asking if he would like to meet sometime over the following months. Growing up, the two men had always been close, bound together by a mere 18-month age difference and the ordinary blend of family ties and events. Birthdays, Christmas, the occasional holiday abroad. Nights at the pub, at the pool table. Lloyd was good, easy company.

He could surprise, too. Paul would often wonder at his cousin's encyclopaedic knowledge of ancient history and astronomy. The Parsons were from Buckinghamshire, while the Walfords represented the London branch of the family, at least until Lloyd's parents moved to Devon in the early 1980s.

"He was my favourite," explained Paul, a gently spoken software engineer in his early 60s, when we spoke in mid-May. "He was honest and fun. The sort of person you'd like to know."

In the passing decades, a distance opened between them. Lloyd took a job at Channel 4 before following his parents to south-west England, eventually settling in Barnstaple, a pretty riverside town in north Devon. At first, the cousins stayed in semi-regular contact, though things became increasingly sporadic after Lloyd's mother died in the mid-2000s. In 2011, his brother died, followed by his father a year later.

After that came periods of lengthening radio silence. Paul got the sense that his cousin was dissatisfied with life in Devon and a run of mundane manual jobs. Between 2012 and 2015, Lloyd could not be reached, only surfacing when contacted about an insurance policy connected to his late father. In 2019, he dropped out of sight again, before being traced via his small handful of Facebook friends.