A BBC article on Britain’s oldest man said that he had been born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
I imagine there must be quite a fair number of people running around who were born in countries that no longer exist – even leaving out dissolved or created unions (such as Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, or East and West Germany), there are some cases in which the borders have changed altogether.
How are such people dealt with in matters of passports, birth certificates, and the like? I suppose the answer is often “poorly,” but details would be interesting.
I remember an earlier thread on this topic in which I described my great-aunt’s battle over her place of birth.
I imagine it’s an issue that comes up quite frequently. Each country presumably develops its own protcols about how to deal with a birth certificate from a country that no longer exists. Is it really any harder a problem to solve than trying to assess a birth/marriage certificate from a country that does exist but whose record keeping capabilities are seriously sub-standard?
I saw a TV show about 15 years ago (Some kind of news program; no cite available) that claimed that the oldest surviving “nationality” in the world was Samaritan, although fewer than 600 people qualified to hold that nationality. IIRC, the qualifying conditions include: Born in Israel, both parents are Samaritan, hold only a specific few books of the Old Testament as sacred. Not sure when there was ever a Samaritan state, but the sect’s population peaked at about a million in the 4th Century.
I’d been told by a friend with Ashkenazi roots that Ruthenians were Jewish Moldovans denied Moldovan citizenship, but the few Ruthenian websites I’ve seen contradict this (to the point that they refer to a “Ruthenian Catholic Church” in Ukraine and the Baltics).
Lots of Western/Central Asian nationalities got passed by when the nation-state boundaries were set up, like the Kurds and Uighurs. I think Tibetans refer to themselves as Tibetan and not Chinese.
here’s a cool website that lists countries from history that no longer exist. It doesn’t list the major ones (Austro-Hungarian Empire) so much as small ones you’ve never heard of: like New Iceland, a republic that was located in present-day Manitoba. Check it out; you might find out the place you’re living used to be a completely different country…!
In the case of the Austrian-Hungarian empire I rather suspect that the people in question were not “Austrian-Hungarian” citizens but citizens of the appropriate member state of the empire (Austria, Hungary). Law and government of the empire was only partly unified.
Generally, when a state is incorporated in another or when a state splits into several the resulting entity/entities legislate explicitly on citizenship of the affected people. The inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian empire become Austrian/Hungarian/Czechoslovakian/etc. citizens. The question of how long the old passports remain valid would also be subject to legislation; people would need to get new passports after that. (For example, East German ID documents remained valid after unification; their original term of validity now probably has run out).
The citizenship status of people would be one of the most important questions on legislators’ minds after countries have merged or split up, so there is hardly any risk of the issue not being clarified (albeit not necessary to the satisfaction of everyone - see the citizenship question of ethnic-Russian ex-Soviet citizens in the Baltic states).
Regarding birth certificates, obviously there is nothing that invalidates the original one, and if a new copy needs to be issued it would be issued on the new country’s form, based on the old country’s records.
I remember a while back reading somewhere about a small inhabited island off the coast of Austrailia/NZ, that was basically sinking. It was a sovereign protectorate, and the existing plans were that the people there would be able to relocate to Austrailia and still regain their sovereignity.
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I recall that many years ago I received a letter offering me the services of a company that would help me survive “these dangerous times”. Quite prescient really, times weren’t so dangerous back then and it all read like spy fiction - fake ids, numbered accounts, how to stay anonymous and “real” fake passports. They had access to passport blanks from countries that no longer existed or had changed their name (I recall Ceylon was one).
They recommended acquiring one. For their fee they would add your photo, make it look real, even put in a few arrival/departure stamps. The idea wasn’t to fool immigration, they stated clearly that it wouldn’t, but to fool any enemies of your real country that wanted to see your passport.
I know a former citizen of the Soviet Union who basically didn’t care to pick any new citizenship after the dissapearance of the country. It seems she didn’t need to until she wanted to emigrate. She could pick Kazakh (the country she was born in) Russian (I’m not sure why. Because her parents were Russian? Because Russia granted citizenship to any resident of the former Union?) and Ukrainian (the place were she lived). She picked Ukrainian because it was more convenient to get quickly official documents (Patriotism was obviously not a concern for her).
But apparently, she was previously able to live in Ukraine for years without any defined citizenship.
“Oldest nationality” is much like the GQ debate we had a while ago about “oldest country”: the answer depends almost totally on what your criteria are. That said, Samaritans do survive and trace their cultural lineage back to Achaemenid-Empire times.
Ruthenian in the 18th and 19th Century meant an inhabitant of the Western Ukraine, the part that was Westernized and under first Polish and then Austro-Hungarian rule. Following World War I, that was largely incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR in the Soviet Union, and “Ruthenian” meant the single Ukrainian province of inter-war Czechoslovakia, the single province of modern Ukraine west of the Carpathians, lying around Uzhgorod. It was briefly independent in 1939-40 when the first breakup of Czechoslovokia happened. Wikipedia on Ruthenia.
The Ruthenian Catholic Church is one of the Byzantine-rite smaller churches that is part of the Catholic Church, separate from the Roman or Latin rite that comprises the majority of Catholics. Apparently anyone from the western steppes speaking a Slavic language could legitimately term himself a Ruthenian under somebody’s usage, and the Ruthenian Ashkenazi may have just been one of many groups that did so.
How is this arrangement supposed to work? Is it like the Indian Reservations in America, where the residents have a certain degree of autonomy within a certain region? I can’t imagine that Australia would allow Tuvaluans to live in Australia and yet be totally independent of Australian law.
There’s this guy’s story, of a man who was expelled from Iran for political reasons without a passport, and he can’t enter another country without one, so he was stuck in the Paris airport for 10 years, which was long enough to drive him nuts, so that when the paperwork finally came through, he refused to accept it.
He did, however, accept $250,000 from Dreamworks for the movie rights.
Well, no more than a tourist in Canada is immune from Canadian law. You don’t have to have Country X nationality to be subject to Country X law should you happen to be in Country X.
I don’t know exactly how it worked in Latvia or Lithuania, but in Estonia they automatically granted citizenship to anyone who was a citizen of the republic during the last census they took before being annexed by the USSR (and then Nazi Germany and then USSR again) or could show descent from someone who was a citizen at the time. Everyone else had to go through a naturalization process if they wanted to acquire citizenship.
In theory, it didn’t matter if you were ethnically Estonian or ethnically Russian (or some other ethnicity). However, relatively few Russians could claim citizenship or descent from a citizen of the pre-soviet republic since the vast majority had arrived following the soviet takeover. Furthermore, the citizenship requirements included a fairly tough language exam and most Russians did not speak Estonian at all.
This lead to a situation where there were quite a few Russians who were officially stateless. The numbers seem to be around 130,000 Russians with no citizenship 14 years after independence. A little less than twice as many have either Russian or Estonian citizenship. Estonia has a population of about 1.3 million.
This is essentially the sort of situation that the OP asked about. Some citizens of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) were given citizenship and some weren’t. Those who didn’t recieve citizenship did not necessarily have any citizenship at all.
For the Estonians who drafted the citizenship law, the Estonian SSR was not legitimate. They saw the pre-soviet republic as the only legitimate authority. For this reason their citzenship law looked to the last time the republic had been independent, 1940.
"Citizenship of the Russian Federation may be acquired:
[snip]
All citizens of the former USSR permanently residing in the Russian Federation on the day of the entry into force of the Citizenship Act and not having declared within a year thereof that they did not wish to hold the citizenship of the Russian Federation acquired that citizenship by acceptance.
This category of persons includes children whose parents are Russian citizens, whatever their place of birth. If one of the parents is a Russian citizen and the other is a stateless person, the child is a citizen of the Russian Federation regardless of where he or she was born.
If the other parent has another citizenship (citizenship of another State), the question of the child’s citizenship, regardless of place of birth is determined on the basis of a written agreement between the parents. In the absence of such an agreement, the child acquires the citizenship of the Russian Federation if he or she was born in its territory or if he or she would otherwise become a stateless person.
Children become citizens of the Russian Federation if their parents are unknown, or if they were born in Russia to parents who were nationals of other States, or if those States do not grant them their citizenship, or if they were born in Russia to stateless persons.
The acquisition of Russian citizenship by registration may be described as a simplified version of the procedure for the granting of citizenship. In order to acquire Russian citizenship under this procedure it is necessary to express the wish to become a Russian citizen by submitting an application. Russians permanently residing in former republics of the Soviet Union and not having the citizenship of their country of residence can also obtain Russian citizenship by the simplified registration procedure.
As for foreign citizens and stateless persons, the usual condition for them to be granted Russian citizenship, under article 19 of the Citizenship Act, is permanent and uninterrupted residence in the Russian Federation for five years or three years, respectively, directly prior to making an application. For recognized refugees in the Russian Federation these time-limits are reduced by half.
[snip]
The Russian Federation encourages stateless persons to acquire Russian citizenship and does not prevent them from acquiring any other citizenship. The Russian Federation, views arbitrary deprivation of citizenship as a violation of a basic human right, namely the “right to have rights”.
[snip]
The Russian Federation considers that, in the case of the succession of States, when the predecessor State ceases to exist, all of its citizens have the right to acquire the citizenship of the successor State. This principle has been followed by the majority of the States that were formed after the dissolution of the USSR."
Each former Soviet republic has its own citizenship laws, but the ones in the Baltics are particularly sensitive ont he subject of non-ethnic Russians who resettled there after the Soviet takeover of the Baltics. My own grandfather was born in Latvia in 1904 and came to the U.S. as an infant, and once, just out of sheer curiosity (or geekiness, your call which) I once looked into whether it would have been possible for him to reclaim Latvian citizenship, and in turn, for my father to claim derivative Latvian citizenship (and maybe for myself in return - hey, one of these days Latvia will probably join the EU, and I thought it might be handy to have a citizenship alternative). Currently, Latvian law is that in order to be eligible to reclaim Latvian citizenship, and in turn derivative Latvian citizenship, one must have been resident in Latvia at the time of the Soviet invasion.
As most of my ancestors are from countries that either no longer exist or have current borders greatly changed from the ones at the time of their births (including one grandmother who always told us she was from Austria, but on furhter research turns out to be from a small town in southern Poland, near the Slovak border), I can tell you it’s a research nightmare. Here’s some detail for a single example: Eastern Europe FAQ
As an extremely general rule, in Eastern Europe birth and marriage records are held by the locality where the event in question took place, or in the nearest decent-sized town, though the locality (and the language in which the records are kept) may have changed hands multiple times in the past century or so. And as you can see from the example above, sometimes different religious communities kept their own records. And in the Jewish case, in some localities children were registered as illegitimate if the parents had had a religious marriage ceremony not recognized by state authorities, and sometimes the dates of children’s births, particularly boys, were not recorded, or had significant details modified, in an attempt to avoid draconian draft laws, particularly in the Russian Empire.
Combine this with place names and personal names that shifted languages constantly (a person or a town could be listed using a Yiddish name in one document, a Slavic name in another, and a name in another local language, say Latvian, in a third), and the fact that many E. European Jews didn’t have last names in the modern sense until the last century or so, and you can see how genealogy becomes a time-consuming endeavor.
Heck, my own grandmother was born in Canada, but her East European immigrant parents didn’t register her birth at all until she was almost 16, which is totally freaky for Canada - I think they just didn’t know any better. And it was quite a shocker to all of us when I got her birth certificate in the mail (a microfilm of the handwritten original filled out by her father - pretty cool!) and discovered her first name wasn’t what any of us thought it was all these years - and she’s still living. Heck, if I had to get her a Canadian passport, I’m not sure the Canadians would believe the whole mess.
Eva Luna: Your “Austrian” grandmother was from Austria. Just not the small Republik Oesterreich that’s been around 1918-38 and 1949-present. Galicia was a province of Austria (as opposed to Hungary) under the Dual Monarchy, even though it’s now divided between Poland and Ukraine a couple of countries away from R.O.
