Fast forward a bit and he once again lives in California. Waiting over a year, his appointment finally came last week and we found a little bit of information I wanted to pass along. First, if an ancestor has already obtained citizenship “jure sanguinis” then the descendant’s requirements change slightly. In his case for the San Francisco consulate, he may not have needed to make an appointment at all!

Here’s what was required:

1. His birth certificate, apostille, translation
2. Application with details all the way up to the original citizen (great grandfather in this case)
3. Form 2A, with a list of his residences
4. Form 2B is NOT required since our father’s document is already on file
5. Copy of US Passport
6. Certified copy of his marriage license, apostille, translation
7. Simple photocopy of his wife’s birth certificate

My brother was married last year so his wife is not eligible to apply for another two years. When she does, I think she’ll need to submit the equivalent of the first 5 items in the above list for herself since everything else will be on file.

The key thing he learned is “if one of your parents is currently Italian and registered in our anagrafe, you can contact the office of vital statistics directly“. No appointment, no waiting 1+ years, no going to the consulate! Instead, you can simply piggy back on the work of your Italian ancestor (in this case our father who applied with me a couple of years ago) and bypass the queue. If you have a parent or sibling who has already done the work, this is a huge short cut for you.

Also, in other news, the primary citizenship person at the San Francisco consulate, Anna Marie Stone, is apparently leaving after 25 years. No news on a replacement but her knowledge and expertise will certainly be missed by those applying. Buona fortuna!

As it turns out, the road took a fork and I found he had become a citizen and with a copy of a declaration of intent to become a citizen, I was able to file my paperwork and receive my dual citizenship and passport last year. Here’s what the letter says:

This is in respnose to your Freedom of Information Act/Privacy Act (FOIA/PA) request received in this office March 4, 2008 regarding Prospero Ghidinelli.

We have completed our search for records that are responsive to your request. The record consists of 4 pages of material and we have determined to release it in full. The enclosed record consists of the best reproducible copies available.

Please be advised that the National Records Center does not process petitions, applications or any other type of benefit under the Immigration and Nationality Act. If you have questions or wish to submit documentation relating to a matter pending with the bureau, you must address these issues with your nearest District Office.

If you should have any additional questions about your request, please direct your inquiries to this office at the above address [etc]

I originally filed in late 2006 or early 2007 but my application was denied for being incorrect in some way so I had to refile and thus the 2008 date above. By the time I refiled, I already knew he had become a citizen but I sent it off anyways for completeness. The packet includes four photocopies:

• Department of Labor Form 124A, issued 7/28/1919
• Certificate of Naturalization
• Petition for Naturalization
• Declaration of Intention

The copies are not great but of interest is the Declaration of Intent had his name as Dante (what everyone knew him as and what’s on his tombstone in Italy) and the other documents all have his legal name, Prospero. Clearly someone informed him to get his act together.

I have received a few emails from people who are going through the process themselves and are seeking help but otherwise I haven’t thought much about this lately. I had a busy few months of work and then getting married last month and this was a fun surprise to receive in the mail. I will admit that I had a flash of panic when I first saw it, thinking somehow I had done something wrong, but alls well that ends well!

I’m still itching to use my passport for the first time…

Two thousand and eight was a blur for me – it seemed like a pretty good year but I was inspired by my Dopplr annual report to look more closely at what it entailed. Here’s what I found:

High Level Statistics

• Traveled 51,306km in 11 trips including one around-the-world for three weeks
• Wrote 76 blog posts, mostly about technology
• Struggled with living in the surburbs
• Succumbed to Facebook
• Learned to hypermile truck to cope with $5/gal diesel prices

Now, in Technicolor Detail

1. January
   • Technically it was 2007, but I surprised Jennifer for her NYE birthday with our a trip to Vancouver
   • We celebrated my dad’s 60th birthday in Winters with family at the Buckhorn. Also celebrated arriving alive having navigated flooded country roads en route.
   • On January 11th, I proposed to Jennifer in the Santa Clara Rose Gardens and she accepted! We’re getting married this April.
2. February
   • Went back in time for a modern-day ANSI art exhibit; something I didn’t think I would ever see.
   • Mark and I had a booth for MotorsportReg.com at the SCCA National Convention in San Antonio, Texas. It was a great event for us.
   • I took one day off in February.
3. March
   • Traveled to Salt Lake City to present at a BMW CCA conference. Went snowboarding at Snowbird and my burning legs told me I was way out of shape.
   • I took one day off in March.
4. April
   • In April I was working around the clock, eating microwave dinners at the office, trying to complete a major rearchitecture of MSR that was already months behind schedule.
   • Attended the Indo-Japanese wedding of Brian and Mala Masuda in Santa Barbara. Had some of the best wedding food ever!
5. May
   • Released major rearchitecture of MotorsportReg.com May 3rd. Had performance issues but, like usual, worked around the clock to resolve. Saving grace was incredible customer goodwill earned from years of great customer service – the bump in the road was forgiven.
   • Spent rest of month recovering.
   • Steven graduated with his Masters in Florida. Congrats!
   • Actually had fun at my 10-year college reunion at Santa Clara University.
   • Memorial day camping at Shaver Lake near Yosemite. It was cold, rainy and miserable, but we still managed to have fun defeating the elements with blue-tarp-o-mania and waiting for Dan and Dacia to arrive.
6. June
   • Decided being out of shape sucked, joined the Jewish Community Center gym around the corner from my house.
   • Traveled for R&R to Puerto Vallarta for five days. Injured my back boogie boarding in 2 feet of water. Made gym membership useless.
   • Dexter, our tuxedo rescue cat, arrived from Utah to much rejoicing.
   • Drove my racing kart for the second time in six plus months. There goes the racing season…
7. July
   • Jennifer and I spent a day at the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve enjoying wine and cheese on the beach. Watched sea lions lounge around.
   • Left on a three-week around-the-world trip to cover the 2008 TransSyberia Rally from Moscow, Russia to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia for SpeedTV.com courtesy of my friend Marshall Pruett.
   • Slept in the Moscow Kempinsky looking out window at St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin.
   • Flew in a Soviet-era helicopter to watch the first stage of the rally race.
   • Visited cousin Patrick in Rome.
   • Took overnight train to Munich and stayed with former business partner Rob who was interning with IDEO.
   • Went to Hockenheim to see the Formula 1 German Grand Prix! Bought Kevin a sweet Red Bull hat that I secretly wanted to keep.
   • Flew to Mongolia via Beijing, China. Two weeks before the Olympics, I went to Tiananmen Square and completed a hat trick of communist capital photos (Vietnam, Russia, China).
   • Explored the countryside of Mongolia and watched the final stage of the rally. American team disappointingly broke down the day before the final stage. Flew back to California.
   • A sad day: returned Dexter the cat to the rescue shelter. He spent his entire time with us under the bed or dinner table and needed other cats to feel comfortable.
8. August
   • Labor Day weekend in San Francisco for food and touring and a trip on the Niles Canyon Wine Train near Fremont. Jennifer tricked me into my first pedicure complete with a glass of chardonnay. Ffffffabulous!
   • Jennifer was hospitalized with a kidney infection. It was scary for awhile but everything turned out OK. Kaiser Permanente did a great job taking care of her.
   • After three years of putting together paperwork, my dad, brother and I applied for dual Italian citizenship at the Embassy in San Francisco.
   • Flew to Las Vegas for Jason’s bachelor party-pa-looza
9. September
   • Just three weeks later, I became an official dual citizen of Italy! So much for lazy Europeans!
   • Kevin and Natalie chowed down with us at the Kendall-Jackson Heirloom Tomato Festival.
   • Celebrated my 32nd birthday. Jennifer buys me a bike and tells me to get on it. Embarrassing.
   • Surprised my mom for her 60th birthday with her parents and a cousin in Redding.
   • Was a groomsman in Jason and Nicole’s wedding in Morgan Hill. Got my boogie on.
10. October
    • Received my Italian passport and right to work and live in the EU. Sweet, sweet success.
    • Working with Mark Mazelin, got serious about cfpayment, my open source project for credit card and e-check processing for ColdFusion developers.
    • After twelve months of planning and execution, gave up on trying to reach PCI DSS credit card security compliance in a two-man startup. Outsourced to the tune of $2k/month.
    • Cried like a failure for the balance of the month.
11. November
    • Recovering from boogie boarding gone wrong, signed up with Jennifer for Fuse Gym boot camp.
    • Voted for Barack Obama on November 4th
    • Made a foursome of it with Kevin and Natalie for the almighty three-michelin star restaurant The French Laundry. Having achieved such highs (and emptied my wallet at a supersonic rate), readied ourselves to die (happy).
    • Relocated our mystery Christmas tree farm using Google Maps and felled our second annual Silvertip (the only real Christmas tree)
    • Having left most of our holiday decorations in storage, went for the “modern” look of little more than lights.
    • Got busted by the Aventino apartment complex for having lights on our balcony. Fascists: 1, Brian: 0.
12. December
    • Raced as part of four-driver Team Bimmerworld in the NASA 25 Hours of Thunderhill enduro achieving a goal I set several years ago.
    • We took our engagement photos with Tanja Lippert… this wedding thing is getting serious.
    • Took a rock climbing class at REI in Saratoga.
    • Jennifer’s niece Zoey stayed with us right before Christmas; we made cookies and took her to see the Festival of Lights. Experienced schizophrenic alternating squeals of joy and crying for mommy.
    • Celebrated Kevin’s 30th birthday in style in San Francisco after having a great dinner at Fish and Farm with Jason and Nicole. Partied with Spec Miata master Jason Hoover before he moved to Atlanta. Dan showed up, because he knows everyone. Went big, went home (to hotel) and puked my brains out.
    • Spent two days recovering.
    • Celebrated Jennifer’s 33rd birthday with a house party

Things started off on the wrong foot when the woman, who turned out to be Anna Maria Stone, head of citizenship services at the consulate, asked if I had an appointment for three people or one. While the plan was always to have my brother, dad and I apply simultaneously, I had made the appointment well over a year ago and couldn’t precisely remember. I did recall sending an email about a week ago confirming the three of us were coming but I wasn’t sure. I started sweating, worried that my brother flew out from Florida for nothing and my dad would have to turn around to drive four hours home. Thankfully we waited a few minutes and she was able to see the three of us in a makeshift meeting room in a hallway with a large table and three chairs borrowed from the main office area of the consulate.

Here’s where believing what you read on the Internet gets you into trouble. We pulled out our driver’s licenses to start the process for recording in the visitor’s logbook. My understanding was that if you were applying as a family you could do so together even if not everyone was a resident of that consulate’s jurisdiction. This is not true. When my brother pushed his Florida driver’s license across the table we were told that he could absolutely not apply in San Francisco making his flight to the west coast an expensive exercise in futility. The good news is that he can use our future copies of our Certificates of Recognition with the paperwork I already prepared and apply in Miami. It should be a very quick application.

Anna Maria started with my father since he is one generation up the ladder. Via email, she had told me to come prepared with the documentation in the following order:

1. Application (For San Francisco)
2. Form 2A (For San Francisco)
3. Form 2B (For San Francisco) – Note that this form is about the American born ascendant. Since my GGF was the Italian and my GF was the first American, this form should be filled out for my GF. We accidentally filled it out for our GGF not reading quite carefully enough.
4. Birth/marriage/death/divorce/naturalization paperwork ordered chronologically working from Italian citizen down to the applicant. Translations as needed should be with each document.

She started by reviewing the application, ensuring she could read it and that all of the dates were in proper European format. Then I handed her each document one at a time to confirm we had everything. She was very pleased that we came prepared and while the appointment had started off rocky with my mistakes, Anna Maria was very nice and we had a nice time talking.

Some news that other people will be interested in! At the moment they estimate it will take 3 years to get recognition of citizenship back from Italy. An application like ours with two people and three generations takes about a half day of focused effort putting all of the paperwork together to submit to Italy. The good news is that the consul is taking the backlog seriously and they have hired someone specifically to help work through the queue! This just happened so we’ll have to wait and see for the results but it sounds like a great development to me and probably even better news for people who have been waiting for years.

In hindsight, part of the difficulty of applying for citizenship is that the paperwork required is well documented by the various consulates and community web sites but there isn’t that much material available on the actual appointment procedure and policies. I felt like it was a fine line between asking questions and being a pain in the ass but making assumptions clearly cost us. Hopefully this post will at least give others some insight and convince them to err on the side of asking one too many questions rather than one too few.

Well, not exactly the end, since the SF consulate may take as long as two or more years before I hear back on becoming a dual citizen. Some people claim they have received passports in as little as a month from consulates in Detroit and Houston but the geography lottery put me in the San Francisco jurisdiction.

I have all of my paperwork and I’m waiting on one final translation that should arrive this weekend. I just need to fill out my application and paperwork affirming I’ve never renounced citizenship before. The very nice lady from the consulate provided some detail about the appointment:

If you bring your application packet in binders, folders, plastic sheet protectors, or anything similar, you will need to remove them from such holders, one by one, as we ask for them. Have your application, form 2A and 2B, if applicable, the discrepancy list, a copy of your driver’s license, a copy of your passport in front, with the supporting documentation behind them in chronological order. For the documents requiring a translation, each translation should accompany the document it belongs to.

It sounds very structured and being prepared I think it will be short. I plan on rewarding myself with a super carne asada burrito from Taqueria Cancun afterwards to celebrate with my brother and dad.

The bad news is the delay didn’t get shorter while she was gone but the good news is I have a date! August 19th, 2008 is when it will all go down.

This has been an interesting process. The part I expected was the bureaucracy of it all; from reading other accounts online, this is simply a process that takes a lot of time and patience. We’re talking about getting two governments to cooperate on something that neither of them really like (dual-citizenship) combined with very few people actually doing the work.

The part I didn’t expect was the surprises I’ve learned about my family. The most surprising is that my great-grandfather’s name wasn’t really his! Although everyone knew him as Dante – even my dad thought he was named after him – it turns out his real name was Prospero. I heard he was never naturalized having returned to Italy some years later but it turns out that he did become a citizen. This turns out to be great news: it means I don’t have to wait 18 months (or longer!!) to get a declaration of non-citizenship from the US Immigration Service.

I have been sweating some major bullets over this name discrepancy as each consulate decides what level of mismatches they will accept or not. My grandfather’s birth certificate lists his father as Dante while all other paperwork names him as Prospero. The prospect of having to get official updates or changes is part of what has made me drag it out this long but the semi-official word from the consulate is that it should be OK.

Brow wiped, spirits uplifted, feeling better. I’m excited!

Identity Crisis

What’s in a name?

The problem is that my great grandfather, known as Dante Ghidinelli to everyone including his children, was born Prospero Ghidinelli. Even his tombstone in Italy has the name Dante on it. Depending on the consulate, they may require us to update all records to show his original Italian name. It’s a judgement call… if so, it means filing a legal name change document for a deceased relative. I can smell the red tape from here.

Some links I’ve come across recently that were helpful in figuring out how to establish a “No record” certification of non-existence from the National Archives. Filing a G-639 FOIA form is not completely straightforward when you’re trying to establish documents don’t exist:

• Receiving a no record letter
• Proof of ancestor citizenship status

Just two days later I received a reply (in German) with where to send it and an email address for that office! To be sure I wasn’t playing a game of pin the tail on the donkey with international shipping, I emailed the Thüringer Landesverwaltungsamt and they replied in just 48 hours confirming the details.

Although my American documents have been rolling in surprisingly quickly, I am still very impressed. I put off gathering these documents for over a year because I thought it was going to be such a painful process and it turns out to be pretty easy. At least so far!

In 1961 many nations joined together to create a simplified method of “legalizing” documents for universal recognition. Members of the conference, referred to as the Hague Convention, adopted a document referred to as an Apostille that would be recognized by all member nations.

Documents sent to member nations, completed with an Apostille at the state level, may be submitted directly to the member nation without further action.

Getting an Apostille in California can be done in Sacramento or at one of four regional offices in Fresno, LA, San Diego or San Francisco. SF would be convenient except you need to have the county clerk’s office first certify the notary is legitimate. I think it’s just easier to go to Sacramento.

Here’s the full skinny from the Secretary of State

The literature is a bit unclear, but I called the Notary Public in Sacramento and confirmed that documents brought in-person there do not need to be notarized or certified in their original counties.

You qualify if your paternal or maternal grandfather was born in the United States, your paternal great grandfather was an Italian citizen at the time of his birth, neither you nor your father nor your grandfather ever renounced your right to Italian citizenship.

That’s pretty cool! Since Italy is part of the EU, Italian citizenship entitles me to live and work anywhere in Europe basically. I set about finding what I needed to obtain and it turns out the list is long and nasty and once filed, it may take as long as a year before they get around to actually meeting and accepting you. So I put it off but recently, as my round-the-world trip is getting closer, I have been picking up the slack and making some phone calls. I’m going to record my progress here so I don’t forget what I’m doing.

The short story is you need a birth, marriage, divorce and death certificate (as appropriate) for every person beginning with the original Italian citizen and his spouse all the way down to me. On top of that, each non-Italian document must be authenticated with an Apostille and translated to Italian. Most of these (American) documents are available from the county clerk office where the event took place. For my family, that means mostly California but still spread from the Oregon border to the Bay Area. It also includes a German birth certificate for my grandmother.

Funnily enough, the German certificate was the easiest one to get. I found my grandmother’s hometown via Google and submitted a message to their help desk indicating what I needed and asking them to tell me how much and when to pay. Help from AltaVista’s Babelfish let me send a (poorly, I’m sure) translated version in German as well.

Lo and behold, about 10 days layer the birth certificate just showed up! Sweet! Oh crap, they made a mistake and put today’s date as her birth date. That’s not going to work. I emailed them again explaining what happened and again, another certificate showed up 10 days later – all without spending a dime. I don’t know if this is standard or or a special favor, but I love Frau Graf at the Standesamt in Gotha, Germany!

Today I started making calls to the California offices in Del Norte (Grandfather birth certificate) and Sacramento (Grandparents marriage and father’s birth certs). Although the process isn’t particularly complex, it is time consuming and tedious with each step done either in person (quick but requires travel) or via mail (requires printing a form and having it notarized, then delivered to the office and waiting for a reply). Most documents are between $10 and $20 each, a notary runs $5 and if I was smart I would probably send all of this via certified or express mail.

On top of collecting all of the documents, you have to obtain Apostilles for each of them. An Apostille is just a fancy internationally recognzied stamp of approval that Italy will take. The secretary of state provides it and it’s $20 per document. At that stage, then I can find a translation agency to have these documents translated into Italian and then, ONLY THEN, will the Italian Embassy in San Francisco accept my paperwork and schedule an interview for some date far in the future. Knowing my luck it will be while I’m out of the country.

Regardless, it’s a fascinating process and an interesting insight into my family. For example, I never knew my grandfather’s middle name was “Faustino”. Having met my Italian relatives, both the ones who do and don’t speak English, I am hoping that I will be able to spend a couple of years living abroad at some point and getting to know them, the culture and the language much more intimately. I do love Rome something fierce…

Next steps are to obtain all of the paperwork from the remote clerk offices and then take a trip to do the apostilles and paperwork in Sacramento. That will save the notary fees and will ensure I wind up with everything in my hands.