Born on July 22, 1839, at Fountain Green, Hancock county, Illinois of Scotch-Irish ancestry, he attended public schools near his father’s farm. He graduated with honors from Monmouth College in Illinois in 1860. He was a pioneer “in creating reliable identification records systems and was ready to implement and evaluate new techniques as they became available. McClaughry was the first person to introduce Bertillonage into the United States in 1887… and he persuaded the Warden’s Association of the United States and Canada to adopt the system in the same year.”