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As a general note, it is usually not a good idea to assume that a given military firearm was used by an ancestor in some war or other. Then, as now, military "surplus" guns were often sold by the thousands on the civilian market after a war, and that was certainly true after the U.S. Civil War, when some very advanced muzzle loading muskets suddenly became obsolete "junk". Those were sold literally by the freight car load.
I am not 100 percent sure, but that looks like a Model 1854 Austrian Lorenz short rifle which has a 28" .54 barrel. They were quite good, though troops who compared them directly to U.S. Springfield or British Enfield rifle muskets considered the Lorenz inferior to the British and American guns. I think it unlikely that it was imported by a private individual; some 7292 Lorenz short rifles were imported by the U.S. Army during the war. Over 250,000 Lorenz rifle muskets, basically the same except for a 37.5" barrel vs. a 28" tube for the short rifle, were imported by the Union, and some 100,000 by the Confederacy.
Jim
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