Document Drama: Act One

 

“There was faulty wordin' in the documents / I can still hear you laughin'…”
-Ryan Adams, Sink Ships

In this post, I listed the documents necessary to make my case for Italian citizenship.  I started gathering paperwork for this project back in January 2020 (pre-Covid).  However, I’ve been researching my family tree (off and on) for many years:  my interest in genealogy began back in the eighth grade with a social studies class assignment (yes, that was several decades ago).

So I was very fortunate in several ways:  my grandparents were alive well into my adulthood (living long enough to become great grandparents themselves) and thus I had, over the years, collected family stories, documents, and information from them.  I knew exactly where and when my great grandfather was born in Italy; I also knew in what year he became a naturalized US citizen, as well as when and where he died (I was not-quite-eight years old at the time).  And I certainly knew the necessary information about my grandparents and parents as well.  So it should have been a piece of cake to gather the necessary documents, right?

 Well…sort of. With the help of Google translate, I had no trouble writing a letter in Italian (admittedly a very basic one, in which I also apologized for any mistakes in grammar and spelling, not being a native Italian speaker) to the Anagrafe (registry office) in Corinaldo to request a certified copy of Cesare’s estratto dell'atto di nascita (official extract of his birth record).  It took about a month to arrive; that was 🗲lightning fast🗲 in Italian Bureaucratic Time.

I had two other “foreign” documents (i.e. non-US documents) to request:  the required marriage certificate of my grandparents, who met and married in the UK when my grandfather was stationed there while serving in the US Army (Dec. 1943-Aug. 1945), and an official, legalized (essentially, Apostilled) letter from the UK’s National Archives confirming that my grandfather did not naturalize as a UK citizen during his residency there.  This second document, while not a strict requirement as such, was ordered “just in case,” should the Italian authorities question whether he naturalized in the UK.  This document was quite easy to get, and I received it fairly quickly.  The marriage certificate was more problematical, if only because it was a multi-step process:  I had to 1) obtain a certified, legalized copy of the marriage certificate; 2) I had to have it translated into Italian; and 3) I had to have the translation certified by the Italian Consulate in London (basically, they certify that the translation is correct and was done by an approved translator).  Because I’m not located in the UK, this required a bit of back-and-forth via mail.  Obtaining the marriage record was surprisingly easy; I did have to hire a service provider to take care of getting the marriage certificate translated for me.  Once I had that in hand, I was able to forward this to the Consulate in London for the certification of the translation on my own. All told, it took about five months to complete the above described process, thanks to Covid (short-staffed offices, slow mail, etc.).

Meanwhile, I began ordering all the US-issued vital records I would need – the various birth, marriage, divorce, and death records.  Fortunately for me, all of these items are located in Pennsylvania.  Unfortunately, several documents contained errors that needed addressing in some way.  Most of them were simple to deal with.  A few of them were (stupidly) my own fault.  And one was a serious problem that could have completely derailed my track to citizenship recognition.

I’ll start by describing the easy ones – the errors in my own documents.  For my whole life up to this point, I was under the impression that my name was, well, what it is, and that I was born at Easton Hospital in Easton, PA.  So imagine my surprise when I received the “long form” birth certificate from PA Vital Records with my first name spelled incorrectly, and my birth place listed as Wilson, PA.  WTF?  Every other major document in my life (driver’s license, passport, social security card, marriage records, you name it) has my name spelled correctly; and my marriage licenses all list my place of birth as Easton, PA – because that’s what I’d been told.  Note that the “long form” version is just that – it’s the birth certificate which lists more than just the baby’s name and the parents’ names, as on the short form certificate I have that was issued way (way!) back in the 70s.  I never needed another copy until now, and all my life I guess I just…took my parents’ words for it about my name and place of birth.  Silly me!  I googled “Easton Hospital,” and sure enough, it really is in Wilson Borough – the next town over from the City of Easton.

Why were these seemingly minor mistakes such a big deal, you ask?  Because:  Italian bureaucracy is a bitch.  All the documents have to “match,” (or satisfactory supplemental proof has to be provided in the case of errors that cannot be corrected), to prove that the people listed in the documents are in fact the people in your genealogical line (including yourself).

That meant I had several documents to correct relating to my own records:  my birth certificate (to correct the spelling of my name), and my marriage records, to correct my place of birth.  Correcting my PA birth certificate was relatively simple – there is a form to complete, have notarized, and send in with the appropriate fee along with supporting documentation (I sent my drivers’ license and passport copies, and a certified copy of my marriage record).    Of course, in Covid times, it took a lot longer to get the correction than it would have otherwise.  But still, my name on the record now is in fact…my name spelled as I’ve been writing it all my life because that’s how I was taught to write it.

I’ve been living in the same PA county since before reaching legal adulthood, and my marriage records happen to be filed in the same county.   I emailed the marriage license dept. – in my county, this is part of the function of the Orphans’ Court – to find out how to go about correcting my place of birth in the records.  I discovered that in my county, it’s a relatively simple fix:  you just need to file a petition in court, provide supporting documentation (in this case, a birth certificate), and pay the $50 fee.  In fact, the kind assistant clerk who answered my inquiry went so far as to send me a template for the petition!  I just had to fill in my personal info and print it out.  It took exactly ONE day from the filing of the petitions for Orders to be issued correcting the records – impressive, given that this was in the middle of a pandemic.  It took about a month, though, to receive my “exemplified” copies of the (updated) marriage certificates, because Covid. An exemplified copy, by the way,  is a sort of “super certified” copy – not only is it certified by the Clerk of the Orphans’ Court to be a true and correct copy of the record, but there is a second certification by the Judge of the Orphans’ Court division certifying that the document is certified by the correct Court Officer, as well as a third certification, again by the Clerk of the Orphans’ Court, attesting to the fact that the aforementioned Judge is in fact really a Judge of the Orphans’ Court division.  Sheesh.

Next Up:  Document Drama, Act Two

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