Can't see or delete image I just traced

Hummm. Thanks for responding. Starting to think the image I have been playing with expands to multiple paths and maybe seperate objects, such as an inside trace and outside trace (it is line art). It appears to be mutiple objects stacked one top of one another—which I assumed were the vectors stacked on top of the original raster object.

If you are correct (and I suspect you are now), I wonder why all the online videos show people selecting white space around the scanned graphic and deleting it then? I must have assumed they were deleting the underlying raster image when they were just deleting white space. And possibly the similar paths that seem to be underneath my vector art isn't the image at all (as you say), but in fact an inside vector object of the line art and an outside vector object. There must be a preset somewhere to just trace outside the object as simple outline external to the raster boundries, which is what I need.

You explanation is helpful but no where did I find an video saying that tracing and expanding would delete the original image. I was inder the impression that I had to select the raster image and delete it myself. Fascinating..... thank you very much. My headache will likely dimish now.