Were my father and aunt British citizens at birth?

The basic facts:

Grandmother, born in Canada, 1914, moved to the U.S. in 1930

Never naturalized in the U.S. and was in all probability undocumented from her arrival in the U.S. until her death in 2006 (many people, including her Congressperson’s office, tried to determine whether she ever held any U.S. immigration status, with no success)

Married my grandfather in the U.S. in 1936. I haven’t been able to determine whether my grandfather ever naturalized, but it’s likely he was at least a permanent resident. (He was born in Riga in 1904 and immigrated to the U.S. as a toddler. I guess that means he was a citizen of the Russian Empire at birth, and after that, who knows? Latvia wasn’t an independent country until after WWI. And let’s just say his family wasn’t big on paperwork; his U.S.-born younger brother and sister didn’t have birth certificates until they were in their 40s. I found his brother’s birth certificate on Ancestry.com, and as one of the supporting pieces of documentation he provided as backup was his own marriage certificate!)

Aunt, born 1937 in the United States
Father, born in 1940 in the United States

So Canada didn’t have its own citizenship law until 1947. I know that means my grandmother was born British, but given all the bizarre restrictions on transmission of citizenship to children born in other countries, particularly if the other parent was not a British citizen, did she transmit British citizenship to her children at birth? My father and aunt apparently became Canadian citizens retroactively to 1947, but not until 2015. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, nobody reported their births to any British or Canadian government authority.

If possible, please show your work. (Don’t need answer fast, just curious.)

British nationality law is insanely complicated. But, my take:

In 1914, there was no concept of citizenship of particular countries within the king’s dominions; everybody born in any British territory was just a British Subject. If (as in your grandmother’s case) your claim to British subject status arose from birth not in the UK but in Canada then your passport would be issued by the Canadian authorities, not the UK authorities — if you applied to the UK they would direct you to apply to the Canadian officials. But the passport would still identify you as a British subject.

From, I think, 1921, your grandmother would also have been regarded in Canadian law as a “Canadian national". This wasn’t a completely separate status; it was a subset of British subject status. A Canadian national was a British subject who had prescribed links with Canada (and birth in Canada was one such link).

Because Canada was a self-governing dominion, it has the power to legislate the terms of British subject status for those British subjects who were connected with Canada. And this gives rise, in your grandmother’s case, to a degree of uncertainty. The classic position was that a woman who was a British subject and who married a non-British subject would, except in very limited circumstances, lose her British subject status. If that rule had applied to your grandmother, she would have ceased to be a British subject on her marriage in 1936. In that case her later-born children would have no claim to British subject status by virtue of being born to a former British subject.

However Canada changed its rules in 1932. A female Canadian British subject who married a foreign man after that date could retain her British subject status if she did not acquire foreign nationality by virtue the marriage. To know how this affected your grandmother, we’d need to know what nationality (or, possibly, nationalities) your grandfather had and then we’d need to explore the laws of the country (or countries) concerned to see whether they automatically conferred nationality on the foreign wife of a male citizen. And there’s a second question — if your grandmother could retain her British subject status, did that happen automatically or did she have to register or declare her desire to retain her status in some formal way? And, if something of the kind was necessary, did she do it?

But, for present purposes, the answer to these questions doesn’t matter. Even if your grandmother had remained a British subject, her children born in the US would not have been British subjects; British subject status by descent could only be claimed through the male line.

To carry the story forward, in the years after the Second World War the unified “British Subject” was split into a series of independent citizenships, one for each independent country within the British empire/commonwealth and one for “the UK and Colonies”. Canadian citizenship was established in 1947 and, if your grandmother was still a British subject at that date, then she became a Canadian citizen. Citizenship of the UK and Colonies, with the slightly unfortunate acronym “CUKC”, was established in 1948; your grandmother would not have acquired that status by virtue of birth in Canada. The term “British subject” remained in use as an umbrella term for people who held the citizenship of any Commonwealth country, but it wasn’t a particularly meaningful or useful status. It ceased to be used in that sense in 1983. Also from the 1983 the term “Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies was dropped in favour of “British Citizen”.

In (I think) 1977 Canada amended its citizenship laws so that citizenship by descent could be acquired either through the male or female line. You say that your father and aunt did, in 2015, become Canadian citizens so that suggests (a) that this change was, or later became, retrospective, and (b) that the authorities did accept that your grandmother was a Canadian citizen, which implies they were satisfied that she didn’t lose her status on marriage in 1936.

I believe that in 1936, my grandfather was not a U.S. citizen (I have census records reflecting that he was an alien). If he had any nationality at all, I think it would have been Latvian, although I believe he would have had to apply for that? Or possibly Russian? I have no clue, really. I am also just about 100% sure that my grandmother never took any affirmative action of any kind regarding her citizenship and never held a passport of any kind. (When she arrived in the U.S. in 1930, she wouldn’t have needed one. She only returned to Canada once, in the 1970s, and things were much less formal then. After 9/11, she was unable to renew her U.S. driver’s license because she couldn’t properly document who she was or that she had any right to be in the U.S. Like I said, it’s complicated.)

The reason I believe this is because in 2020, I applied for Canadian citizenship by descent and was denied because of the first-generation limit which was imposed in 2009, and which has since been declared unconstitutional. The denial letter says that my father was retroactively grandfathered for eligibility for Canadian citizenship in 2015. Presumably that means that even if my grandmother ever lost Canadian citizenship, she retroactively regained it. I now have a new application for Canadian citizenship by descent pending and will be curious to see how this all turns out.

I’d be curious how this turns out. I have relatives whose mother was a naturalized Canadian before she moved to the USA and got married. IIRC one of her children mentioned she’d gotten her Canadian citizeship certificate (based oh the mother’s naturalization certificate) despite never living here, and I’m curious whether the grandchildren also can (born before 2007), I mentioned this to one of them a decade ago, touting the low cost of local university if they were in fact Canadian. Not sure if they applied.

I will definitely post once I get my decision, for sure! But I think they should apply now and have encouraged my cousins on Dad’s side to do the same.

This was really interesting: thank you.

Just to clarify - if you are Canadian, you are Canadian and have been. One is simply applying for the papers that assert this. (Same as, if a parent’s citizenship makes you American, you are and always have been…)

Right, but it makes for some sentences with verb tenses that are straight out of science fiction. As in my father gained the right to Canadian citizenship in 2015, when he was 75, but was Canadian from 1947 until his death a year ago.

One of my co-workers years ago described trying to get a birth certificate for his wife’s grandmother so they could visit the USA, back when a birth certificate or driver’s license sufficed. (She didn’t travel much, never drove) They asked for the certificate…
“Where was she born?”
“Fort Qu’Apelle, Northwest Territories.”
“You mean Saskatchewan?”
“No, when she was born it was in the Northwest Territories.”

I don’t know if it’s relevant to your case, but before the 1920s women rarely naturalized in their own right but would acquire “derivative citizenship” through their husbands. It was possible for women to naturalize in their own right but they rarely did so.

I know it was a bit later, but if your grandfather did become a US citizen, is it possible that this status automatically transferred to your grandmother?

Not to hijack this thread, but in most jurisdictions, up to WWII, women who married automatically acquired their husband’s citizenship, but also lost their own. In other words, women were considered only an appendage of their husband.

If my grandfather did naturalize, it was after 1940 so would not have included my grandmother. And I did Freedom of Information Act requests for both of their files 20+ years ago which turned up nothing. And they didn’t marry until 1936 in any case.