This article was published in the Fall/Summer 2021 issue of the Germanic Genealogy Journal .* Down the Rabbit Hole: A Cautionary Tale By Elise Ann Wormuth As newbie genealogists, we often approach our research with equal parts of enthusiasm and incompetence. We are eager to leaf out our family trees and to have access to the genealogical world the internet facilitates in pursuing our passion. So much information exists to explore and to be grafted onto our trees. As newbies we sometimes do not pause to analyze whether the tidbits fit together in the ways they should. I’d like to tell a cautionary tale of how I, as a greenhorn, put too much trust in an experienced researcher and consequently fell into a deep genealogical rabbit hole. I wanted to research the family line of my paternal grandmother’s mother, Matilda “Tillie” Hug . Through the usual sources, I determined that Great-grandmother Tillie’s father was a German immigrant, Wilhelm Hug, but that was as far as I got —...