My sister has been researching our ancestry and found information on our grangmother’s birth that is very confusing. My grandmother was born in Pittsburgh, Pa a few months after her mother arrived in the US from Italy. The document of her birth is a certificate of naturalization and she did not become a US citizen until many years later. (mid 1920’s). i always thought anyone born in the US was automatically a US citizen. Can anyone explain?
Since this probably didn’t happen before the 14th Amendment was proclaimed…somebody may have goofed up. Some official somewhere didn’t do the right thing with the birth certificate. Maybe an element of prejudice was involved: Italian couple has kid, kid must be Italian.
In those days, people weren’t as persnickety about paperwork forms as we are today – and, of course, even today, people slip through the bureaucratic cracks.
(For instance, there are still people – U.S. citizens – working perfectly good jobs, who don’t have a Social Security number. It isn’t supposed to happen…but it can and sometimes does.)
It wasn’t always the case that birth in the United States conferred automatic citizenship. I don’t know exactly when this was changed.
I think it occurred sometime in the mid 20th century as a conciliatory gesture towards the Native American Indians (all previous generations given citizenship, all subsequent would receive as a birthright). Your grandmother must have been born before automatic citizenship was implemented.
She was born 3/24/1897. Almost 30 years after the 14th admendment. Her mother arrived in US 4/1896.
Poor paperwork. My mother, born in 1913, didn’t know her “legal” birthday until she was in her 60s, and needed a passport. Apparently, the doctor made his rounds and noted all the births in the neighborhood, but didn’t turn in the info for a few days, so all the babies had that date as their legal birthday. Of course, her birthday was always celebrated on the actual date she was born, but the government thinks otherwise.
I was mistaken, it was the 14 Amendment. I was thinking of the Indian Citizenship Act, coincidentally in the 20’s, which is why I thought it might have applied to your grandmother.
Common Law problems - where an opinion of some judge can override the constitution.
See
One exception is that the child of a lady in the USA for reasons associated with working as a diplomat is not able to claim citizenship. Probably not the case here.
“slaughter house case” was 1873, removed the automatic right to a child born to tourists and temporary residents. So the statement of the court overrode the constitution. (jurisdiction is normally meant to refer to the land /space inside the borders, not whether they are paying income tax or eligible to claim social security ? )
United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), case restored birthright to children of recent immigrants… 1898. Clearly the case was required at 1898.
Oops, I meant the Wong case “restored the birthright to children born in the USA to ALL recent immigrants, and even temporary workers”.
But it seems that the very recent immigration of the parents was the issue for the case at hand.
*Jus soli *birthright citizenship based upon the 14th Amendment was not confirmed by the SCOTUS until the Wong Kim Ark case (1898). So the OPs grandmother’s birth certificate issued in 1897 would not have recognized her US citizenship. But once her parents became naturalized citizens then she would gain derivative citizenship.
Under Wong Kim Ark, the 14th Amendment language was interpreted to confer American citizenship to all children born in the United States and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”. At the time of Wong Kim Ark that excluded those Native Americans who did not pay tax (mostly those living on reservations). It still to this day does not extend to children of diplomats who are deemed not to be subject to US jurisdiction while within the territory of the United States.
Thank you for the history lesson. Never too old to learn.
Are you certain your grandmother was indeed born in Pittsburgh (like have a birth certificate from a hospital there) ? I have a great-aunt who found out she was not born in the US when she needed her birth certificate to apply for a social security card as an adult. My great-grandmother had gone to Italy to visit her parents and gave birth while she was there. For whatever reason the subject of where she was born had never come up before and she assumed ( probably because she knew her parents emigrated before any children were born) that she was born in the US as were all her siblings , both older and younger . My great-aunt had to be naturalized as her parents either weren’t citizens when she was born or didn’t meet the requirements for passing on citizenship to a child born out of the US. If her grandchildren were doing research, the first document they would find in the US would be the certificate of naturalization.Her grandchildren may or may not know the story of her being born in Italy , but her great-grandchildren almost certainly won’t.
Long before the Fourteenth Amendment, and long before Wong Kim Ark, the United States recognized the children of immigrants as citizens by the principle of jus soli, which it inherited from British common law.
The Fourteenth Amendment closed the exclusion from jus soli that Roger Taney had conjured out of thin air for persons of African ancestry in the Dred Scott case. Wong Kim Ark closed the exclusion from jus soli that Congress had attempted to legislate for Chinese immigrants in the 1880’s.
Why was the OP’s ancestor naturalized? I don’t know. We can’t possibly know. Maybe it was sloppy paperwork. Maybe she wasn’t really born in Pittsburgh. Maybe somebody made a mistake in filling out a form. But by law and practice at the time of her birth, if she was really born to Italian immigrant parents in the US in 1897, she would have been an American citizen.