Finally, I think, my search for 19th-century Greenfield folk artist George Washington Mark’s grave is in the rearview. And go figure: it was hiding in plain sight.

I stumbled across the answer in the “No. 1” condition listed on Mark’s 1873 Franklin County probate court will, published on Ancestry.com. When I contacted Forest Hill Cemetery sexton Matthew Lockhart in Charlestown, New Hampshire, he confirmed that Mark is indeed named on a family stone there.

The next day Lockhart took it a helpful step further, emailing me a photo he took of the Mark family stone, erected some years before the artist’s July 29, 1879 death. It displays a humble white marble gravestone memorializing the Charlestown family of John Mark and sister wives Hannah and Zerviah Thomas. Below their names is a list of nine children – including “George W.”

So, there we have it. Charlestown family etched in stone. G.W. Mark’s final resting place presumably pinpointed for posterity.

I had speculated in recent months that Mark’s grave was most likely in the Summer Hill Cemetery across the Connecticut River from Charlestown in Springfield, Vermont. My suspicion was based on the fact that in 1866 Mark had erected stones there for graves of his mother, Hannah Thomas, who had died in 1799, and brother William, birth and death dates unknown, who died at 18 months old. One would think his 1866 action suggests that Mark, who most experts agree was born in 1795, remembered the tragic passing of his mother and brother.

Because no 20th-century researchers identified the cemetery where Mark is buried, I assumed that this was the intention of the quirky artisan, who was said to have grown increasingly eccentric as he aged. Plus, according to a January 31, 1897 Springfield Republican feature about his surviving art works, Mark had demanded that “no funeral service would be held over his body.” Given that juicy tidbit, I thought it possible that he was cool with resting in an anonymous grave.

Not necessarily so, however, in light of recent discoveries. I guess previous researchers either didn’t think it important to identify his gravesite, or intentionally sidestepped a potentially time-consuming effort.

Mark’s will clearly spelled out his burial wishes, which are repeated in a December 7, 1876 codicil recorded four days after the unexpected death of its first executor, Wendell T. Davis of Greenfield. The codicil appointed a new executor: Franklin G. Fessenden (1849-1931), a lawyer who came to Greenfield from Fitchburg in 1874 as a recent graduate of Harvard law school.

Fessenden, who would go on to serve as a Franklin Superior Court judge from 1891 to 1922, became the steward of Mark’s collected works. After his death, the paintings stayed in his barn before going through the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association in Old Deerfield to a New York City department store that ultimately sold them to collectors.

G.W. Mark was buried in a 700-pound metal coffin which he had purchased some eight years before his death from downtown cabinetmaker and undertaker Joel Lyons. Patrons familiar with Mark’s place of business in downtown Greenfield knew this cumbersome casket, which he is said to have used as a table. It was purchased, Mark said, to spare his family the expense, and it was destined by his will – most likely by rail – for Charlestown, New Hampshire’s “old burial ground.” There he was to be interred by Fessenden and “12 assistants,” paid by the estate.

I searched Mark’s online probate file and was unable to verify the Republican’s forbidden-funeral-service claim.

Mark’s will also provided $200 for “improvements” to both of the cemeteries where his parents and siblings lie. In 1879, according to the AI Genie, $200 was the equivalent of nearly $6,700 today. Among other cash bequests, his widow received $600 and George Sheldon’s Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Society got $100.

So, it seems, the mystery of George Washington Mark’s gravesite has been solved for posterity.

Or has it?

Confusing matters, we know that at least two of the 12 people named on that Charlestown stone are not, in fact, buried there. Hannah Thomas and her infant son William are interred across the river in Springfield – both most likely around Hannah’s posted 1799 death.

Though the Charlestown monument is without question the most reliable, extant, Mark family register, there is no documentation of burial for any of the 12 names inscribed on the stone, including two Johns, two Williams, and two Marys. Three of the names, though not George W.’s, are accompanied by the years they died –William (1809), Zerviah (1818) and Mary (1828) – strongly suggesting they lie there. The rest remain open to conjecture.

“Record keeping was not great for the cemeteries in the past,” explained Lockhart, who photographed the Mark records for me and shared them by email.

As for George W., his will strongly suggests he lies in Charlestown, unless he intentionally threw up a smokescreen. That seems unlikely, even for a peculiar, flashy-dressing folk artist known on the street as an Ichabod Crane lookalike. Perhaps the best way to settle the issue would be to scan the plot with a metal detector. If it goes wild, we’ll have our answer. If not, well, maybe a subsequent scan across the river in Springfield would set the record straight.

Which brings us to another Mark matter: that is a quick glance at another recently discovered mystery, this one concerning the artist’s lineage. One would presume that Mark’s father came from similar Scots-Irish ancestry as another John Mark who died in 1832 and is buried at Gilsum, New Hampshire’s Centennial Cemetery. There is, however, no evidence of a genealogical link between the two men from a southern New Hampshire landscape saturated with Scots-Irish DNA.

The “John Mark” gravestone in Gilsum identifies him as a “native of Ireland, parish of Ahoghill, county of Antrim,” but I could find nothing connecting him and his Charlestown namesake. Ancestry.com census records identify Vermont as the birthplace of G.W. Mark’s parents, but the citation is weak, and offers not a whiff of family origin. Then an intriguing caveat: G.W. Mark’s Greenfield death record identifies his father’s birthplace as “Germany.”

Hmmm? Germany? Where did that come from? Most likely from his widow, a second wife who probably answered questions from the town clerk off the top of her head. The Mark surname could indeed be either Scots-Irish or German, though, and both lineages would have been prevalent in frontier, post-Revolutionary Vermont and New Hampshire.

Scots-Irish immigrants from a circa 1720 migration to New England were among the earliest settlers of inland New Hampshire towns, and became known over time for their military valor in the French & Indian and Revolutionary wars. Then, during the Revolution, came an influx of Redcoat Hessian soldiers from the so-called Northern Campaign, many of whom deserted from the Lake Champlain-Lake George-Hudson Valley battlefield and slipped furtively into nascent settlements on the Vermont/New Hampshire frontier.

Could Mark’s father have been such a man? Or, for that matter, a Hessian soldier who served honorably and decided to stay in America? Though the answer may by now be out of reach, one never knows. There may yet be another dangling thread of inquiry worth tugging.