It’s a mystery, which may never be solved fully, but with patience we find clues. For so many years, a dramatic oil painting of a stormy night in Scotland, waves crashing on the rocks, hung in my parents’ home. From childhood, I made it clear that this was the canvas of my great-great-grandmother Ga’s that I’d like to have someday – and now I do.

On the back of the painting is written in pencil, “Tantallon Castle,” the ruins of which still stand in Scotland.

To my knowledge, Greenville artist M.A. Lord – Mary (Cummings) Bennett Lord – never went to Scotland, and my dad’s best guess was that she had seen a picture of the castle and painted from that. I’ve looked at many a travel book on Scotland and found quite a few images of Tantallon, none of them the same view shown in the painting.

The family tradition is that my great-great-grandmother had Scots ancestry. Her Harrises, we know, go back to the monarchs of England, including Edward I. We’re not sure how far back she knew her family history, but it’s interesting that the Scots ancestor I have found in her line, Robert Dunbar, was from Dunbar, a small town not far from Tantallon.

Tantallon being a fairly rare word – the best kind to look up on the Internet, I went searching for it on one of those auction sites where I like to look at postcards and so forth.

Patiently I clicked on each image to see whether any of them matched up with the “view” matching my painting.

Then I found Ga’s painting!

Well, not actually. The color image before my eyes, which wasn’t the same but certainly very similar, was a print of a 1910 oil painting by Thomas Moran, one of the Hudson River School-style of artists.

That makes sense. I’ve always enjoyed landscapes by Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church, for example.

I looked around the Web a little more, and found countless sites for companies which “reproduce” artworks such as Moran’s. I knew, of course, that one could buy reproductions of the Mona Lisa, for example, and I think it’s great to have prints of originals that would otherwise be too expensive. But the idea that so many people are willing to paint Moran’s work as a reproduction commercially struck me funny.

We know that my great-great-grandmother attended the Osgood Art School in New York in the late 1800s, and my estimate is that she painted Tantallon, which Moran produced in 1910, in the 1920s or 1930s.

I don’t know that any of her other paintings are obviously patterned after other works, but there may be some. A small painting of birch trees and a stream, which she gave my maternal grandmother, Edith Steeves, I know was a work she created more than once. More than 40 years ago I saw a copy of it in the home of Abbie Fowler of Sangerville, and I believe she told me that Ga painted it.

On the other hand, we also know that Ga painted originals such as one of Bruno, a dog, and of the first schoolhouse in Greenville, which she attended – the latter owned by the Moosehead Historical Society.

So it is that the big wide Web may give us clues about our ancestors.

A Family History Workshop, sponsored by Mount Desert Isle Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution, will be held 1 p.m. Saturday, June 3, at the Somesville Union Meeting House.

The session will be directed by Norma Spurling, chapter regent, with registrar Margaret Montcalm and Connee Jellison, who organized the chapter some years ago and later wrote Family Ties for many years. All of these ladies have had experience on the state board of Maine DAR.

Area specialists on hand will include Elizabeth Hotchkiss, state corresponding secretary for DAR and organizer of the Majabigwaduce Chapter in Brooksville; and Patti Leland, local historian and president of the Hancock County Genealogical Society. If you have a question about Hancock County, these genealogists are the ones to ask.

Refreshments will be served, and those who wish may “take a walk through time” in the ancient burial ground and at the town’s historical building and library.

The Bangor Museum and Center for History begins its summer walking tours of Mount Hope Cemetery at 6 p.m. Friday, June 2, outside the superintendent’s lodge by the State Street entrance. The fee is $5 adults, $4 seniors, free for BMCH members and children. This is a wonderful tour!

The Irish-American Society of Maine met as recently as 1999 in Bangor. James Costelloe of Hampden wants to know if there is sufficient interest to revive the group. There may be a meeting for those interested during the American Folk Festival in August. You may contact Costelloe at 862-4360.

Send genealogy queries to Family Ties, Bangor Daily News, P.O. Box 1329, Bangor, ME 04402; or send e-mail, familyti@bangordailynews.net.