do you have ancestors that immigrated to the united states if you live in america chances are
you do so you will want to learn how to explore the naturalization records for the united states
today i'm going to give you a brief overview of how to explore u.s naturalization records to find
details about your ancestors now what records you have it's all dependent upon when your ancestor
naturalized naturalization began when the country was formed after the american revolution in 1776
so from that time period to the presence naturalization has
the process has evolved although some key elements are very very similar so i'm going to give you the
overview the most likely paper trail first but recognize that you're going to have to
dive in to find out just how much your ancestors immigration process and naturalization process
compares to the standard the first document that many teachers citizens of the united
states had to complete is the declaration of intention there are some time periods in history
when this could be bypassed because that potential citizen or that applicant did something that they
didn't have to do this step so a declaration of intent was designed to say hey i'm moving
to this country and i'm going to sign my first citizenship process paper often called burst
papers and i'm telling you i was part of this country and i now want to be uh aligned and pledge
my allegiance to the united states depending on when they completed this naturalization
uh process or this declaration of intent you could have a lot of information and very limited
information now this is the certificate of a declaration of intent to become a member
of the united states of america and this was created by george booker in 1887 and he is from
germany and notice that most of these declaration of intent don't tell you very much more than that
the more modern the declaration of the tent the more details you may find the further back in
time the less information you have and sometimes those declarations that i have seen have just been
all hand written instead of these nice pre-printed forms where just a few little details are put in
after the declaration of intent comes there is a naturalization petition and again depending
on when your ancestor is going through this process you're gonna have a lot of invariant
information now this naturalization petition took place in the commonwealth of massachusetts
in september 18 uh 1900 and as you can see there's a lot of information here the name of the person
his age his occupation where he lives jefferson street and worcester uh he where he was born in
russia and um the birth date so there's lots of information who he's resigning his allegiance to
hearing numbers and a lot of great details so the this typically happened after a period of
residency in some cases the standard was about five years there is a time period where it was
about 14 years and that was from the late 1700s to 1802 and then it changed back to five years and
then there's some times where the residency period was truncated based on certain participation and
activities that we'll talk about in just a moment but naturalization positions some of them are
online and a lot of them are yet to be digitized the next document you may have is a certificate
of arrival and this began to be utilized more heavily after the basic naturalization act of 1906
and so what you may find a certificate that was sent back to the port of entry and asked do you
have records that this person came in on this ship on this date yes great send me back that document
and what's also great is sometimes you're gonna find that information on the passenger list a
little note where somebody said yeah we certified it on this date so you can see that kind of cross
as certificates of arrival the next thing you may find is the uh record of an oath of
an allegiance ceremony now i found this in my research for joseph geisler who i wrote about
back there what this was was just an entry in a court record and it said on this day
these people came and stood before me and were sworn in as new citizens of the country
and it will have the person's name and their witness name and that's it there were about 50
or so individuals that certified on that same day some of them were for bought from bottom just like
joseph was and some were from ireland and england and it's just a roster that completes that summer
ceremony now these records will be in court records i have not seen very many of them
online if i am wrong please let me know kindly in the comments section so we can all learn together
now finally you may find the certificate of naturalization now some people have one that looks
like this and other people have one that's like really fancy and attractive you may find some
of these digitized this one happens to be in the naturalization records in hancock county ohio i
found mine through my cut distant cousin who kept the family papers and this one had been framed
so you might find a lot of these really in-home collections so those are the basic documentations
that's the basic process and it changes depending on the time period your ancestor is going through
all of these stages but let's talk a little bit about who naturalizes not every person who came to
the country naturalized they kept their citizens shipped from their home country they didn't meet
the requirements or they just didn't want to go through the loopholes so let's talk about children
and women because most names you're going to find in the naturalization records are male
it doesn't mean women won't show up it typically means the male will and that's because children
were naturalized as part of their parental process so my grandfather joseph
became the naturalized citizen so his children if they were born in a foreign country and
migrated with him they'd automatically get their citizenship there for women however there's a
couple of little caveats to keep in mind first foreign-born women who migrated to the country
derived their citizenship through their husbands naturalization process until the year 1922 after
that the laws changed and they can get their own citizenship records now if a foreign-born woman
married an american-born citizen they received their naturalization citizenship right there they
didn't actually have to go through the process they became a citizen upon marriage except this
only really applied between 1855 and 1922 there were some other caveats taking place in the law
so i highly recommend you do some more research but if you have a woman who's migrating
in 1858 and they're foreign born they marry an american citizen they're not going to be um
required to go through the naturalization process i have read that women who are american born and
then marry a foreign citizen they do actually have to do some paperwork with citizenship there so
make sure you read up on the laws to try to find out when you might expect your ancestors to appear
in these documentation and who is going to be the primary person now the things i have seen is as
the naturalization progresses through modern times you're going to see the children's names
on the petitions to demonstrate that they're all being naturalized at the same time but as you move
backwards in time i don't see that as much but it could just be my luck that those are the records
that just didn't keep a lot of information so don't take that as a hard and fast rule
because the one thing we've learned in genealogy research here in the united states is there is
no standardization for quite a long time so if you have an ancestor who immigrated and you think they
might have gone through the naturalization process what are you gonna do in order to track down those
records let me give you a research plan so the first step is to question whether your ancestor
naturalized or not some never did some didn't naturalize right away when they got to the country
they may have been um birds of flight if you will they might have gone back and forth between their
home country and then many years later after their first initial migration they may start the process
so don't look for right after they arrived in the united states you may actually have to expand your
range of when that took place so that means you need to look for clues in traditional records for
when they migrated and when they may have started their naturalization process or completed it so um
search for places of origin birth arrival length of residence information and
sometimes you might see this information in burial records obituaries and military records so again
these traditional records looking for clues for when this process might have taken place
the next thing you want to do is you want to build a timeline of their life if you haven't already
now it's really easy to make a timeline because you can simply use family search and ancestry and
some other online platforms that when you start adding residence information 1860 lives here 1870
lives here city directory lived here that creates a timeline for you and then what you're looking
for is where they lived because they may have started their naturalization process in one place
and finished it in another and even though the hancon canny collection that i was
featuring a little while ago actually has several documents from several different locations i found
one from sandusky oneida new york that threw me for a loop for a while until i realized oh this is
a packet that's taking place so you want to have a timeline to see where they were to maybe they
did their declaration in one place and they did their petition in another and they did their final
allegiance in another place and in that other place and they may have all the records or they
may be scattered throughout the country so that's why you want to build that timeline
to try to figure out where do i need to look for these records then i want you to look
for more clues over on my blog i have a whole series of documents of where you
may find more clues about naturalization to give you a sampling sometimes newspapers will
record a list of who naturalized or who completed the declaration of intention and sometimes they do
passenger list uh land records might have some clues and civil war pension records
will also have that information in there and there's some caveats with the civil war that you
want to be aware of sometimes a foreign-born individual who hasn't naturalized already
if they go and serve in the civil war they don't have to do the declaration of a tinch they don't
have to do the residency requirement they do have to do the naturalization position so it kind of
shrinks a little bit so go and look for more clues once you have all the possible clues
it's time to go look for the declaration of a tent go look for the petition papers of naturalization
and all of those records because you're going to know a lot of details about your ancestors to back
it up with that additional proof that you may or may not find now unfortunately i keep lucking out
with my ancestor joseph geisler we did see the court roster of when he completed a ceremony we
do have the certificate of naturalization but it cannot find his declaration of intention
and because i don't know where he lived prior to living in columbus ohio i had the entire country
to search to see if he did a declaration of intent somewhere else and because most of these records
are browse only it's going to be a while before i give that a go or i'm just going to be patient
and hope that these collections get indexed and then i can do a global search in that way now
as i have mentioned throughout this video i want you to go to the show notes because there's a lot
more information that i can't really cover um for in respect of your video time but let me give you
a few final tips number one always look for the original record don't stop at an index so some
online sources have a searchable index but you want to make sure you go to the original documents
with the exception of the declaration of intent those other original records might have
more details that you're going to want to find especially if it says a home village where they're
from good luck when you're looking at the records most naturalization certificates the petitions
and other documents are more than one page the declaration of intent may just be like a third of
a page but regardless i want you to follow the tip of going a few pages forward and a few pages after
number one make sure that you're looking at the entire document that is available or extra
papers that might be in the collection for your ancestor but also look for who else naturalized
or began their process and finished it the various steps at the same time those could
be kinsmen or people from the same town as your ancestor and they can be part of the fan club that
you're trying to research if you can't find your ancestor directly then search for extended family
members and look for people that migrated in the group like i just said remember that sometimes
the people that are naturalizing or beginning their declaration process are from the same town
or they may have been on the same ship together so you do want to investigate everybody to leave no
stone unturned if you have other tips and tricks that you think people in the community would love
to hear that's also what the comments are for so if you have great resources that you want to
link out to then put it there just don't make it to the inappropriate non-genealogy websites
if you want to learn more about how to be a better researcher check out this playlist
above and if you're ready for something new check out this video right here sandisky or not