So, in 2016 I started collecting documents to prove my Italian lineage and have my existing Italian citizenship recognized by the Italian government. They are awesomely pretty forgiving about who qualifies: your ancestor who came to the US I think could've left right after the creation of the modern Italian state in 1861. The main important point was that your ancestor needed to have the next generation born in the United States before they naturalized. This gave their child Italian blood citizenship and American land citizenship, which they then passed on to me.
I did a lot of the early genealogy work at the St. Louis Central Library. I was a broke boy and the library had an Ancestry.com account but you had to physically be at the library to use it. By late 2017 I was ready to move to Italy in the hope that that would simplify the paperwork and/or shorten the amount of time that everything would take. I didn't have a job at the time so was probably in the mood for a drastic life change.
During my genealogy undertaking my Mom suggested that I reach out to my great uncle Ernie, who I didn't know existed. I talked to him on the phone and email a few times. He had some good stories to tell and a few good documents about Ernesto from Italy.
Collecting all of those documents was a large undertaking, complicated by the fact that my relationship with that side of the family has been somewhere between strained and nonexistent for my entire life. It turned out that collecting birth, death, and marriage certificates from my dead relatives was much simpler than the live ones. My grandmother wasn't interested in helping me and I tried and failed to go around her with a couple of trips to a courthouse in upper peninsula Michigan. I had an appointment with the Italian consulate in Chicago to present my documents but this speed bump threw me into disarray and I canceled the trip. In 2018 I wrote musing to myself that "All of this bloodline stuff makes me laugh because I now have many of the same problems as a member of some medieval royal family. I have to wait for my grandmother to die before I can claim my birthright. I’m considering the fact that once I have obtained this treasure I have no one in my bloodline to pass it to. Maybe I should have like a hundred children so that my dynasty of Italian citizens lasts a thousand years? Nah."
Sadly covid killed grandma and then her documents were incredibly simple to obtain. I then had to go through the nasty process of obtaining another consulate appointment. Nasty to the point that people hit refresh on their computer browser a few seconds before midnight Rome time every day hoping for one of these elusive appointments. I got one that was a significant amount of time in the future, maybe a year or something, and waited. I had plenty to do in the meantime.
Each of the certificates I had collected needed to be apostilled, which is a fancy stamp and authentication process done by the secretary of state's office of whatever state the document is from in accordance with 1961 Hague Convention Abolishing the Requirement of Legalization for Foreign Public Documents. Both this and the original documents then needed to be translated. When the time came covid had also killed the in-person interview at the consulate, so I simply mailed all of my 63 pages of documents in. The consulate then had 2 years to review them. To the shock of no one 2 years came and went without a peep.
I stayed mostly patient until yesterday because the Italian government suddenly changed the rules and I started to panic. They created the "minor issue" which said that if the Italian who emigrated to the US naturalized after their child was born BUT before the child became an adult, the child automatically then lost the Italian citizenship they had been born with. This was a pretty nasty surprise for a lot of people with similar dreams as my own. This rule applied to me/my family's situation as well so I was in full on freak out mode. Of course Ernie was born in 2023 and I needed my citizenship to go through before I could start on his, so he was threatened as well. What a headache!
So I chatted to the Chicago consulate a little bit and they nonchalantly informed me that I was a recognized Italian citizen!! This had to be one of the most anticlimactic wins of my life after years of working to get it done and zero fanfare. I was maybe more relieved to not be screwed by the new law rather than really even tasting the victory.
I feel like this was one last gift from my dad, so I'm happy that I put in the work to accept it. I learned a ton about my family along the way, too.
Ern was less excited about our new nationality than he was about these festive Halloween themed window decorations.
We took our ball apple to the Kirkland Library and did some reading.
They turned the splash pads off in front of the grocery store but that just made it even easier to stick our head in the fountains.
I picked up a bottle of sparkly Italian prosecco to celebrate my citizenship win. Many people are saying that I am also a sparkling, delicious Italian.
