Yes, I saw the list of required documents. However, my husband’s family is full of situations that don’t fit standard lists. They are all U.S. citizens by birth overseas to U.S. citizen parents, on one side of the family going back 200 years, and on the other side also going back several generations. None has ever been a citizen of India (or any country besides the U.S., as far as we know, at least since they migrated to the U.S. from England, Scotland, etc. between the 18th/early 19th centuries). As far as birth documentation:
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His mother, born in India in 1940, has a U.S. Consular Report of Birth Abroad, a hospital birth certificate of sorts (it’s basically just a handwritten note on hospital letterhead with her name and her parents’ names), and a baptismal certificate. Of course India didn’t consistently have its own government registration of births until the 1970s, so that’s not terribly unusual for someone born in the time and place where she was born. She basically lived in India from when she was born until she moved to the U.S. for college, and if needed we don’t think it would be a problem to get school records from India, etc.
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He was born in Lebanon in the 1970s, and has a U.S. Consular Report of Birth Abroad, a hospital birth certificate, and a baptismal certificate. Lebanon did have civil birth registration, but his parents never registered his birth with the Lebanese government. Further inquiry revealed that they didn’t realize it was something they needed to do, and they left Lebanon for another posting when he was an infant, anyway. Could he go back now and register his birth with the Lebanese authorities? Maybe, but it sounds like a giant PITA under the best of circumstances, and if you’ve read any Lebanese news lately, these are not the best of circumstances, especially for something that is normally done in person and a fair bit less than 50 years after the fact.
The family history in India on his father’s side goes back 200 years, but for somewhat obvious reasons it’s going to be pretty difficult, if not impossible, to come up with those original birth documents.
Here’s a somewhat more detailed list from the third-party contractor who processes the documentation, which specifically says that hospital birth certificates are not accepted. The relevant chunk of the Indian Constitution regarding who was eligible to apply for Indian citizenship at the time the Constitution took effect:
At the commencement of this Constitution, every person who has his domicile in the territory of India and —
- who was born in the territory of India; or
- either of whose parents was born in the territory of India; or
- who has been ordinarily resident in the territory of India for not less than five years immediately preceding such commencement,
shall be a citizen of India.
So does that mean that my husband somehow needs to send off his possibly irreplaceable birth documentation to a country experiencing civil unrest to be apostilled there in the embassy of a third country, because Lebanon doesn’t belong to the Hague Convention on apostilles? Forgive us if we would like to confirm the specifics before we make a possibly unfixable mistake.
And as far as people experiencing difficulties in the application process, yes, I am saying “white.” I mentioned personal knowledge of a white person who did indeed qualify as a PIO who was rejected on initial application. That’s hardly hearsay. We’ll see how my high school friend (whose parents were born and raised in India - she is the first generation born in the U.S.) does when she applies for her daughter, who physically takes after her (non-Indian, American, so white he glows in the dark) father.
I would be quite glad to find out that we are overthinking the whole thing, and that we just need to get the Consular Reports of Birth Abroad apostilled at the State Department - at least if those get lost, it would be a pain, but they could be replaced. All the same, there’s an email in to the Indian Foreign Ministry to confirm exactly what they want, and from whom.
I am taking it as a challenge! Honestly, either he’s eligible, or he’s not, and it’s a pretty low-risk thing just to give it a shot. And I have an attorney co-worker who is of Indian descent and has gone through the process before, so I can also pick her brain if I need to. But I definitely need a good night’s sleep first!