Many family trees have a child who features on censuses, but disappears in adulthood. Coal miner John McQuillan of Worsborough Dale near Barnsley went missing between 1891 and 1901. Similarly, his Uncle Peter could not be traced anywhere after the 1861 census. In such situations, emigration is a possibility, but records may be inconclusive.

The only clue to their whereabouts was from a centenarian; a hazy, half-remembered, uncorroborated tale that she had heard as a very young woman. The story was that Uncle John and a friend played a prank with a fruit cart, but the joke backfired when the cart tipped over, spilling the wares down the hill. Afraid of ‘the vile-tempered Irishman’, who owned the cart, John was too scared to go home and had hidden with his mother’s family until she got together enough money to send him to relatives in America. John never contacted any of the family again, but the unnamed friend who emigrated with him returned in the 1920s for a visit, bringing news.

Owing to a misremembered detail that John’s father was ‘the vile-tempered Irishman’, and the fact that John had a cousin with the same name, confirming that the missing man was in America took several years. John’s father died in the spring of 1891, which appeared to fix the time when he left the country. Records even showed that a John McQuillan of similar age arrived in the USA that year, but a miner in Pennsylvania, who arrived in 1895, seemed a more likely candidate, despite the date not fitting with the oral account.

Only when Barnsley newspapers became available online and could be used in conjunction with custodial records did it became clear that John was still living in Worsborough Dale in February 1895. It was now possible to confirm that the Pennsylvanian miner was the correct match, and other aspects of the news brought by the friend in the 1920s also fell into place.

What remains unclear is the incident itself. The fruit cart story may have been invented by John’s sister to pacify her curious daughter when the unnamed friend visited, as it seems a trivial reason for emigration. Perhaps more likely, given John’s history of drunk and disorderly conduct and assaulting police officers, was that he had committed a very serious offence and needed to make himself scarce.

From Yorkshire to the USA
With one missing relative located, the question became: who had John been sent to see? Peter McQuillan was not the only missing member of the family but after checking other names and drawing blanks, details for a factory worker living in Patterson, New Jersey in the 1880s all pointed to this being John’s uncle. How much contact there may have been between Patterson and Worsborough Dale is conjecture. By 1895, widower Peter had been dead for almost a decade and his eldest daughter and son must have struggled at first to support themselves and their three younger siblings. Ongoing correspondence with relatives they had never met, across an ocean, seems unlikely.

The finances of the orphaned family were probably improving in 1895. Lizzie was a milliner, May a stenographer, Annie training as a nurse, and Thomas a glazier. Hugh, aged 21 and head of the family, was working as a postal clerk. If John did arrive on their doorstep in Patterson, it is difficult to imagine what his industrious cousins would have found in common with a possible thug who had apparently left England under a cloud.

John and Hugh McQuillan were born within a year of each other, in 1872 and 1873, into working-class homes, but at this point the similarities end. John became a miner, the main option available to a boy of his class. Although his parents had both been labourers, teenaged Hugh’s first job was as a counter clerk in the postal service. Success in examinations paved the way to more responsible roles. He studied law in his spare time, and in 1908 joined the New Jersey legal profession.

By 1912, Hugh was a Revenue Protection Officer with a reputation for being zealous, honest and effective in collecting the correct fees for postal services, while investigating and prosecuting fraud. In 1919, he gained a significant promotion when he was chosen to join a small team of specialist investigators at the newly formed Internal Revenue Bureau, to prevent tax evasion. This meant a move across the Hudson River to New York and an apartment in Manhattan’s Upper West Side where he lived with his wife, Kitty.

The Internal Revenue Bureau came into being around the same time as the notorious 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibited the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquor. Enforcing compliance with the unpopular law fell to the IRB; no easy task when strong public demand for alcohol fuelled illegal distilling and selling, from which gangsters made fortunes, thanks to violence, intimidation and bribery of law enforcement officers.

As head of the Bureau’s Special Intelligence Unit in New York, the focus of Hugh’s work in the 1920s and 1930s was the dual one of preventing the loss of tax revenue and destroying the networks of organised crime. This involved detailed, painstaking but effective investigations, usually conducted away from the limelight, which provided unassailable evidence for prosecution lawyers to secure convictions for offences such as fraud, tax evasion and corruption.

The public profile of Hugh and his department was low compared with others who sometimes received fulsome credit for their work in law enforcement, but his contribution was probably more significant. Unravelling complicated financial transactions and identifying corrupt officials was more effective in tearing down webs of organised crime than high-profile raids which removed just one outlet.

As a very senior and experienced member of the Internal Revenue Bureau, Hugh would have been involved with the investigation which led to the conviction of gangster Al Capone for tax evasion in 1931. Later that decade he worked with state prosecutor Thomas Dewey (subsequently an unsuccessful challenger for the United States presidency) in a sustained assault on the New York criminal underworld.

The occasion when it is possible to see Hugh McQuillan’s contribution was after the kidnapping and murder of the baby son of aviator Charles Lindbergh in 1932. While the police hunted for the baby and his kidnappers, Hugh’s team focused on the ransom money, recording all the bills which were paid over, and investigating any which turned up in circulation. When the police arrested a suspect in 1934, the map maintained by the Internal Revenue Bureau showed that most of the money had been spent within a few miles of the suspect’s home. Subsequent financial investigation led Hugh to conclude that the suspect had no accomplices.

Hugh’s government career was planned to end in 1943. Its closing years were focused on ensuring compliance with wartime regulations, a task which did not end until the war itself. At the end of 1945, he was able to retire from full-time public service after a career spanning more than half a century.

The first years of his retirement were occupied with part-time work as a specialist consultant in tax matters and travel. He died in 1955 after a period of ill health. Although his marriage was childless and there are no records of any of his siblings having children, he was mourned in New York and New Jersey by a wide and influential circle of friends.

Discovering Hugh McQuillan proves the value of investigating what happened to individuals who disappear from the usual records. His father, a weaver by trade, left a three-roomed miner’s house in Worsborough Dale that he shared with his parents and four adult siblings and crossed an ocean. This was probably to escape from the cruel coal pits which, by 1861, were his only means of scraping a living.

The life of his talented and determined eldest son Hugh shows the American dream in action. The most his father’s country of birth would have offered Hugh, despite his many talents, was a miner’s pick and lamp, possibly supplemented by a role in the miner’s union, and perhaps an unpaid place on a local government board. What his father’s adopted country gave him was the opportunity to use those talents to benefit his country and himself, irrespective of his lowly social origins.