In 1947, when Helen Spriggs began working as a maid, cook and nurse for the McHugh family in Fox Chapel, she was a grandmother well-acquainted with sorrow, having buried three husbands.

A strong African-American woman, Helen cared for two small boys as if they were her own and held the family together while Beverly Quinn McHugh mourned the loss of her young husband and a third child, who lived for only five days.

Then in 1953, the McHughs sold their Shady Lane home and moved to rural New Jersey, taking Helen with them. She held Edward and Joe McHugh, bathed them, spoon-fed them in their high chairs, refereed battles over toys and tucked them in at night with stories and prayers. She later helped prepare them for school as they entered kindergarten.

Then she vanished.

"One day she was there with cookies and milk on the kitchen table when I got home from school and the next she was gone," Joe said recently.

Joe was only 5 when Helen left her employment with the family, but she's alive in his memory. Like Miss Skeeter, the young white woman in The New York Times best-seller "The Help" who yearned to reconnect with the black maid who had raised her, Joe longed to find Helen.

"I have this enormous emotional feeling about how important she was to me. She was the font of everything wonderful in my life," he said.

So, 13 years ago, from his home in Olympia, Wash., Joe began searching for her.

"I assumed that Helen must have died. I never thought to ask my mother for Helen's last name. I knew somehow she was not originally from Pittsburgh," said Joe, 60, a father of four, professional storyteller and producer of a public radio show called "Family Stories."

Diligent research, a fascination with roots and an interest in children's developing brains fueled his quest. The search led to Maryland, Ireland, New Jersey, New York City and the Library of Congress.

Joe McHugh will discuss his search in a multimedia presentation tomorrow during a free program from 7 to 9 p.m. in the auditorium of Homewood's Carnegie Library.

'I won't leave you'

Joe did not realize how much his mother depended on Helen until 1997. His mother, who was battling cancer, told him what happened after her husband, Edward Clark McHugh Jr., died from polio in a Pittsburgh hospital in 1951.

"I came home from the hospital and there was Helen. I literally threw myself in Helen's arms and said, "Helen, please don't leave me now. And Helen said, 'I won't leave you, Mrs. McHugh, until you want me to.' "

Many people would have wanted to flee because polio was a highly contagious disease that could kill or cripple.

"What if he had infected her and us? She must have been frantic. Helen must have been anxious. She lived with us. She cooked for us. Everybody, for days, must have been on edge about being infected," Joe said.

The family buried Edward McHugh, a highly decorated World War II veteran, on his 33rd birthday. Two months later, his widow, lost her third son, Patrick, shortly after his birth.

Overwhelmed with grief, she retreated into her bedroom, where she read the literature she loved ... Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and the Bronte sisters.

As she neared the end of her life in 1999, Beverly McHugh told her son, "I have a regret that I never stayed in touch with Helen."

Moving to New Jersey

At the time of his death, Edward McHugh Jr., was secretary of the Patrick McGraw Wool Co. on the North Side. His father, Edward McHugh Sr., had married into the McGraw family when he wed Alice McGraw.

After Edward Jr. died, Joe's grandparents decided to sell the family business and his mother moved the children to Andover in northwestern New Jersey to be close to her family, where they ran Aunt Kate's, a roadside hamburger stand.

Joe's mother pleaded with Helen to accompany the family.

But it was an isolating experience for Helen. She didn't know anyone outside the McHugh family and the community was not welcoming to African Americans. "There were no black people living in that area. The Ku Klux Klan had a chapter," Joe said.

By the time his mother began teaching English and history at Central High School in Paterson, N.J., Joe was in the first grade. That was when Helen left.

Although she had played a key role in the McHugh household for nine years, little was said about her afterward; there were no cards or visits. When Joe began his search, none of the relatives he asked even knew Helen's last name, where she had come from or what had happened to her.

In the late 1990s, at a national conference of juvenile and family court judges in Minneapolis, Joe wandered into a discussion about troubled youngsters where one expert outlined "sad brain syndrome."

"If a mother goes into a prolonged depression" between the time a child is in utero and three years later, "the architecture of the mother's brain will affect the child and that child will be wired for depression," Joe said.

Realizing he was spared that fate because of Helen's affection and care, Joe became determined to find her family.

"Helen had played this enormous role. I had always felt this huge affection for her," he said.

A letter and a clue

One night, he received a phone call from his first cousin, Chris Carey. His mother, Ruth, had died and he had found a box containing letters Beverly Quinn McHugh wrote to his mother while living in Pittsburgh. Picking one at random, Chris Carey quoted this paragraph:

"On Sunday Helen got a message that her grandson burned to death down in Maryland. He was only 19 and had a child himself under a year old. She left immediately for home and I got a message later that he burned in her house, so she is staying down there for a week to 10 days to collect her insurance."

Postmarked April 25 or 28 of 1952, the letter was the first important clue. Joe spent hours looking at back issues of The Baltimore Sun and The Afro-American, newspapers that covered the Maryland city.

"I did find Helen's family in the most remarkable way," he said.

An important discovery was a front page story headlined "Fires rage across city and state, three children die." At the end of that story was an account of a fire in Brunswick, Md. A young man, with the last name of Thomas, age 19 or 20, had died.

Joe's wife, Paula, searched stories from a newspaper in Frederick, Md., and got more details, including the fact that Mr. Thomas was black.

In Brunswick, Joe looked for leads at a firehouse and a museum, where a staff member gave him the telephone number of an older black woman who knew the railroad town's history. He called and the woman told him her name was Estella Belt, daughter-in-law of Helen.

"I worked for your [paternal] grandparents on Devonshire Street after you moved to New Jersey," Mrs. Belt told him. I knew Miss Helen from the day I was born. We all lived on Shady Lane," she said.

Joe thought she was talking about Shady Lane in Fox Chapel, then realized she was gesturing toward a dead-end street in Brunswick, Md., where six or eight black families lived close to one another in a small community.

Why she did not return

Mrs. Belt also explained the reason for Helen's departure.

After Helen journeyed to Brunswick because of the fire, she developed a sore on her side that did not heal and began taking pain medication. She did not speak of her illness to family members and called Joe's mother to say that she had to stay in Maryland a while longer.

"Helen had left for what my mother thought was a visit down to Maryland. I think my mother thought she was coming back. I don't think my mother knew Helen was ill," Joe said.

"I don't think she wanted my mother to know she was ill," he said.

His mother never hired anyone else, continued teaching, raising her sons and invited her parents, Al and Anna, to live with her in 1960 after they sold their restaurant and retired.

Helen died in 1960 and was buried without a gravestone in St. Mary's Catholic Cemetery in Petersville, Md., a rural community six miles away from Brunswick. Her grave is near a member of the Belt family.

"Helen, to me, was a saint. She came in and saved our family. My hope is to find out exactly where she is buried," Joe said.

Once that happens, he and his older brother, Edward, a New Jersey lawyer, will place a marker on the resting place of the woman they loved.

Doug Oster writes a blog, "Growing With Doug," exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.