The Dream Genealogy Trip

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 —  no birthplace or city of origin. I discovered a group researching the Hug surname and posted that I was looking for a Wilhelm Hug, who arrived in the United States sometime before 1860 as he was listed on the 1860 US Census.

I received a message from a very experienced researcher who had the Hugs as a minor branch of his/her family tree, joined by marriage to their ancestors. CW had a great deal of information from both Germany and the US and assured me that “their” Wilhelm Hug, the son of Benedict Hug of Heiligenzell, BadenWürttemberg, was in fact the one for whom I was looking. I was thrilled because CW had enough to get me started on the Hugs from Baden-Württemberg!

Warning Sign 1

I tried to fit a square peg into a round hole. The 1880 US Census said that Wilhelm Hug was from Prussia, not Baden-Württemberg. I pored over historical maps of Prussia and discovered that, at one time, a little tiny part of BadenWürttemberg had been included in Prussia, so I forged on.

I fell down the rabbit hole. I spent many, many hours researching the Hug family and creating their story. I became fascinated with an early member of the family, Blasius Hug, a master butcher who lived in Heiligenzell; our Hugs were descended from his son Landolin. In seeking more information, I reached out to a Baden-Württemberg email list, and, miraculously, a German researcher sent me relevant pages from the local Ortsfamilienbuch. (Figure 1.) I learned that, in

1752, Blasius married a woman named Salome Bernauer; that they had three children, Landolin, Christian, and Maria Ann; that Landolin was born out of wedlock; and that Blasius himself had been born not in Heiligenzell but in Wolfach, a beautiful town in the Black Forest.

Figure 1. Ortsfamilienbuch: Blasius Hug, Fifth Great-Grandfather, Butcher in Heiligenzell

I was excited about this new information about Blasius Hug and wanted to share it with the researcher, but they completely rejected it! I told them I’d seen the pages from the Ortsfamilienbuch, which clearly said that Blasius was born in Wolfach, but they insisted that their information was right, and mine was wrong.

Warning Sign 2

A researcher refuses to accept what appears to be solid evidence, suggesting that their mind is not open to new information. But I said to myself, they are much more experienced than I am, so they must know what they are talking about.

I'm stubborn. I wanted to prove that I was right about Blasius Hug. I spent hours and hours looking through 25 years of microfilm at the local Family History Center. Finally, I found it —  the only entry that could conceivably be his — as Blasius is an extremely unusual name: On 3 February 1721, Franciscus Blasius (or Franz Blasy) Hug was baptized in St. Laurentius Church in Wolfach. Since it was the feast day of St. Blaise, that likely led to his name being Blasius. Instantly, I googled pictures of the church, of the town, of the countryside. I was so excited that I went on, digging up more history about the Baden-Württemberg Hugs.

I learned the system through which men attained guild status. I discovered that one of our ancestors had been the Mayor of Breisach. I found out that the illegitimate Landolin led a sad life and was never more than a laborer in a vineyard, while his brother had a successful life as an innkeeper. I discovered that Marie Antoinette stayed at a monastery in the area during her procession from Austria to Paris in 1770, and imagined my ancestors in the crowd of well-wishers, hoping to get a glimpse of the young princess.

Warning Sign 3

Proceeding, despite missing a critical link, I spent hours with microfilmed birth records and the existing documentary history while closing my eyes to the big gap in the chain of events.

But the big missing piece was nagging at me: For all the information I had developed, and at that point, I could go back six generations from “Tillie” Hug, I had no proof that the Wilhelm Hug who arrived in the US prior to 1860 was the Wilhelm Hug, son of Benedict Hug, who descended from Blasius. No record of his voyage or where he was actually from in Germany had been located. This genealogical gap began to bother me enough that I became determined to find out.

At this point, I was still a new researcher and had just begun ordering death certificates. I knew that the New York City documents contained a space for birthplace and parents’ names, and I’d been able to pinpoint the birthplace of a great-grandfather through that information, so I wrote to New York for Wilhelm Hug’s death certificate. In the meantime, I decided to go over the information I had with a fine-toothed comb.

I followed the standard advice to go back and reread census documents very carefully; even at that early stage, I knew that censuses were a rich source of information. In looking at the “Birthplace” column for Wilhelm Hug, all the federal and New York State censuses said “Prussia” or “Germany” except for one, but that one was not legible:

Figure 2. 1870 New York State Census of

Birthplace of Wilhelm Hug

I looked at the census taker's writing of other letters and figured that the first letter was likely an H, and I saw a similar flourish at the end of some of the letter r's. I continued searching through the records and finally came up with a very similar word:

Figure 3. Census Taker’s Writing of Other Letters from the 1870 New York State Census

Going back to Wilhelm Hug’s record (Figure 2), if we ignore the little flourish over the second letter that makes it look like a capital E, likely the ink bleeding through from the other side of the paper, those words are very similar. This explanation was the consensus of experienced people on the German Genealogy Facebook page as well. My great-great grandfather was not from Baden-Württemberg but from Hannover, far to the north. And in the blink of an eye, all that work went down the drain.

Figure 4. 1894 Death Record of Wilhelm Hug with Father’s Name Written as Adolph

A few weeks later, I received Wilhelm Hug’s death record from New York City, and there it was, in black and white —  on a register of deaths in Jamaica, New York. His father was a man named Adolph Hug, not Benedict Hug of Heiligenzell. (Figure 4)

I felt frustrated about all the time I spent on that branch, my most developed one, hours online, hours in the Family History Center in Santa Cruz, California, hours writing posts about them on my blog, and so on. All that time down the drain. But what I was not prepared for was how sad I felt saying goodbye to those people, because I had come to care so much about them and their lives.

How could I get so attached to people who lived hundreds of years ago? It's not as if they lived in the house with us when we were growing up, as our Grandma Sophie did. Others who practice genealogy understand; once you go beyond the mere recording of dates and places, once you begin looking at history and social practices and culture, ancestors begin to become real people, and it’s easy to fall in love with them.

Lessons Learned

What did I learn from this experience? 1) Do your own research. 2) No matter how confident another researcher sounds, they can be wrong. Trust your intuitions and evidence. 3) Start with what you know and work backwards. If I had waited until I had developed all the information I could about Wilhelm Hug in the US, I would not have fallen down the Baden-Württemberg rabbit hole. 4) Do not skip over a missing link. You can waste an enormous amount of time researching a possibility, only to have the link, once established, negate all your work.

Live and learn, as a genealogist. I am a much better researcher now; I do not take shortcuts, and I do not move on until I have the documentation to solidify the step I am on. But I am still sad that I had to say goodbye to Landolin and Blasius and I do not have a fifth great-grandmother named Salome who might have seen Marie Antoinette.

What should I do with the information I developed on the Heiligenzell Hugs? Rather than tossing it in the virtual dustbin, I separated that branch from my tree and posted it as a separate public tree on Ancestry.com to help those who are looking for their actual ancestors.

Sources for Images

Figure 1: Gänshirt, A., Reinbold, E., & Siefert, K.

Ortsfamilienbuch Heiligenzell. Erschienen: LahrDinglingen: Interessengemeinschaft Badischer Ortssippenbücher, Köbele, 2007.

Figure 2: U.S. Census Bureau. 1870 Census. Retrieved from www.ancestry.com/interactive/ 7163/4274937_00418/29055412. Page 8. 

Figure 3: U.S. Census Bureau. 1870 Census. Retrieved from www.ancestry.com/interactive/ 7163/4274937_00418/29055412. Page 7.

Figure 4:  New York City Municipal Archives.  Register of

Deaths in the Town of Jamaica for January 11, 1894. 

*In the interest of maintaining the anonymity of the experienced researcher, I have chosen to use the non-gendered they/their pronouns.  Also, I apologize for the weird formatting -- I wish I were more experienced with Blogger!