Thirty years ago, Leroy Vincon McKay left his wife and five children in Hoboken and never came back. Since then, his family wondered what had happened to him. Two weeks ago, the McKays found out through a Reporter article that Leroy had just died in South Carolina. Tuesday, McKay’s daughter, son-in-law and grandchild attended his funeral. The saga began two weeks ago when Cherokee County, S.C. Coroner Joe Vinesett called the Reporter saying that a man had died in Gaffney, S.C., leaving no relatives. The man, Leroy McKay, 73, had friends in Gaffney whom he had met through a local veterans’ group. He had told his friends that he had children in Hoboken, but he never talked about why he had left them 30 years ago. Vinesett wanted to find McKay’s relatives so that they could give him a proper burial. After the article appeared, Perry McKay, Leroy’s wife, who still lives in Hoboken, read it and alerted her children. One of them, Annie Majuka of Howell, N.J. in Monmouth County, decided to attend the funeral. She brought her husband and son to Gaffney last week. “The people down there were really great,” Majuka said Wednesday. “They handled everything. I had nothing to do. They arranged for the priest to come to the cemetery. They held the body an extra week to give me time to go down there. They took me to the place father had lived, places he hung out. I wanted to order flowers; they took care of that. I can understand why my father made that his home. … They were wonderful people. I will never forget them.” Majuka said she was not sure how McKay had chosen Gaffney. She said that when McKay had left home, he was separated from her mother. At the time, Majuka was 17. Her oldest sibling was 19 and her youngest was 11. “I loved my father a great deal,” Majuka said. She added that she had always wondered what had happened to him. Majuka said that McKay had never divorced her mother, and her mother, who is now 73, never remarried. Although friends of McKay’s said that he had been married to a woman in Gaffney for a while, Majuka said that this could not have been the case because he was never divorced. “I don’t know what that was all about,” she said. Twenty to 25 people attended the funeral, Vinesett said. “He had quite a few friends connected with the VFW,” Vinesett said. “And the people that owned the motel he lived in, they were there. I ‘spect there were 20, 25 people there.” Friends of McKay who knew him had described him as a giving person and a “hardy feller.” Since arriving in Gaffney, he had worked as a cook and then retired. Vinesett said that McKay had enough money in the bank to pay for the funeral and burial. “We didn’t have to bury him in pauper’s field,” Vinesett said. “We bought him a nice lot and put him away as if he were a member of our own family.” Vinesett also said he has been taking some ribbing over the original Reporter article, which had described Vinesett as having “the honeydrip-slow drawl of the area’s residents.” “We’ve been having a few laughs over that brogue you gave me,” Vinesett said.