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Message:: [QUOTE="Bakersgma, post: 26699, member: 59"]I should tell you a personal art-genealogy story. Maybe 30 years ago, my mother started to hand out to family members a large number of watercolors, unframed, that had dates from the mid-1890's to the early 1910's. All signed T. C. Hays. I got 3 and asked where they came from. She said they had been her grandmother's, but she thought they were done by "a friend of the family." Fast forward to 2010 when I signed up for Ancestry and started building my family tree. To my astonishment, I found that a brother-in-law of that grandmother married a woman whose maiden name was Hays. They were all painted by her father - Thomas C Hays, whose "regular job" involved running a store at a train station serving the lower Hudson Valley/western Connecticut area. No wonder so many were "bucolic" scenes! They're actually very nicely done for a "Sunday painter."[/QUOTE]