Restored Lightroom from a recently backed up, back-up drive and Recent photos missing from the Library (Lightroom 5)

After moving the catalogue and photos from my backup drive to my new mac, none of my recent photos from the last month or two are appearing in the lightroom library. I backed up my previous computer (which was stolen) a week ago. The recent photos do appear in my "Lightroom Photos" folder and my recently retouched, exported photos are there, but the recent photos are not to be found in the Lightroom library catalogue. I've deleted Lightroom and reinstalled it. I also deleted and re-transferred the Lightroom catalogue files. No luck getting these photos to appear in the library.  

The old laptop was a mid 2011 mac and the new laptop is a mid 2010 (so the new computer is actually older). Both computers are/were running OS El Capitan and Lightroom 5. 

I want to get this resolved, because I've done a lot of retouching in the last few months, which I don't want to redo.