I Became the Archivist of My Family
Should you "DIY" attempting to find all the records for a jus sanguinis case yourself?
That wasn’t a role I volunteered for.
It emerged slowly, almost invisibly, the way these things tend to. One document led to another. One correction required three more explanations. And at some point, I realized I wasn’t “applying for citizenship” anymore—I was reconstructing a family history the state insisted had always existed in clean, legible form.
It hadn’t.
(What made matters more interesting: many of the stories I had been told about the “family line” turned out not to be true—or at best, incomplete.)
By the end of the process, I had assembled roughly thirty official documents, drafted thirteen sworn affidavits, and corrected records issued by multiple state authorities. I also discovered something more unsettling: every modern sovereignty project eventually turns someone into an archivist.
That person is rarely prepared.
The Illusion of a Starting Point
People imagine jus sanguinis as a straight line: ancestor → parent → you.
In reality, it’s a scavenger hunt through decaying institutions that were never designed to agree with each other. Worse, they often don’t even agree with themselves. Records are scattered across states, counties, courts, churches, and agencies—each with its own logic, indexing system, and blind spots.
My case ran through my father’s side. His parents were born before their own parents naturalized. That fact—simple in theory—meant proving every birth, death, marriage, and legal transition across four generations, without contradiction.
The problem was that no one remembered anything.
Not dates. Not locations. Not even basic sequences. At one point, my father scolded me for not knowing family anniversaries—only to discover he couldn’t recall when or where his own parents were married.
Archives don’t accept “probably.”
They accept specifics.
And with that, I became a skip tracer on the hunt for my relatives.