Two citizenships are better than one?

As I was putting together my Italian documentation for my research win with Lo Schiavo Genealogica, I noted that one of the other services they provide is helping people apply for US-Italian dual citizenship.  So I did a little digging, and it looks like I am eligible for Italian citizenship.

According to Italian Law 91 of February 5, 1992, one can have Italian citizenship by descent or bloodline, known as jus/jure sanguinis.  Following some specific guidelines, and assuming no one renounced Italian citizenship along the way, many individuals of Italian descent living elsewhere can have their birth right of Italian citizenship recognized by proving the direct line of descent.

My paternal great grandfather was born in Italy and immigrated to America in 1889, which is after 1861, when the present-day country of Italy was formed.  Once in America, he did not become a naturalized US citizen - he completed an Alien Registration file in 1940, and his death certificate from 1950 showed his citizenship to still be Italian.  Therefore my grandfather was born in the US to an Italian citizen, making him a citizen of the US and Italy.  And that right of citizenship passes through my grandfather to my father to me.

There are numerous businesses that provide services to put together the paperwork required to have Italian citizenship by descent recognized by the Italian government. Official birth and marriage records for all generations between you and the Italian immigrant, proof of non-citizenship of the Italian immigrant in the new country when descendants were born, translation of all non-Italian records into Italian, and an apostille (a type of legal certification recognized internationally) for each are required as part of the request package.  The more generations back to Italy, the more paperwork - there is always red tape!

Citizenship in Italy includes a number of benefits, such as the ability to apply for an Italian passport and travel as a European Union citizen in Europe, access to education and health care, and less hoops to jump through to acquire property in Italy.

There are also potential drawbacks, however.  The Department of State has some warnings about dual nationality, including potential law conflicts as well as making it more difficult to protect US citizens abroad, especially when in their other country of citizenship.  If you are looking to hold a job that requires a US security clearance, having allegiance to a second country, or worse, actively seeking it, is perhaps not the best move.

So, it is something to consider.  Since I currently don't possess the NYC birth and marriage certificates for my grandfather's birth and my great-grandparent's marriage, not to mention the official Swedish birth certificate for my Swedish great-grandmother, it is a moot point for me at the moment.  But it is still cool that I *could* claim Italian citizenship. 

Winning Week

This past week has been an excellent one for genealogy wins.  Last Tuesday I was notified that I won the €100 worth of publications prize from Eneclann's RootsTech drawing.  And Saturday at the Fairfax Genealogical Society Spring Conference I won 5 hours of Italian genealogy research with Lo Schiavo Genealogica.  It must be my birthday week!

Now for the hard part - choosing my Irish publications, and determining what Italian information I want to focus on for my research.  I don't know where in Ireland my ancestors came from, so I don't have specific counties or townlands from which to request data.  And now I have quite a number of Italian ancestors to choose from for further research in Italy!  Decisions, decisions...

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, make me a match....

A Smart Match on MyHeritage has led me to my first Italian cousin, as opposed to the Italian-American cousins I have been connecting with up to this point.  In my experience, MyHeritage, being an Israeli-based company rather than US, attracts more European users.  So if you have European ancestry and want to connect with living cousins, put a tree out there.  Unless your ancestry is the British Isles, in which case Find my Past is probably the better bet.  If I ever find Irish townlands of origin for my Irish lines, I might finally spend some time on Find my Past, but I'm not there yet! 

I've connected with many Swedish cousins on MyHeritage (lots of cousins of Buzz Aldrin!), but had not updated my Italian line recently.  Adding in some of the recent Italian discoveries from my Omignano focus the last couple of months brought up some new hits.  I sent a message via the web site to contact my potential cousin, and a couple of weeks later, she replied!  And even though I don't speak Italian, and she doesn't speak English, we've traded emails and exchanged pictures of our Italian Giordano ancestors.  So now I have a cousin to visit when I finally get my Italy trip plan together.  And maybe local feet on the ground to hunt down records, especially if they are OUR family records and not just MY family records.  :)

Working through the Omignano records is reaping benefits!  Time to get back to it....

OMG No! The Saga Continues....

I have been continuing to index my Omignano (OMG, No!) records, in between hunting down family of DNA matches.  Every time I locate a record for one of my DNA matches, I add that record to my index, so even when I'm chasing matches I am still indexing!  So I have some indexing that is done by year and other runs by surname.  I've filled in a few more of the deaths for 1866-1874, completed the deaths for 1875 through part of 1889 and the births for 1866 and 1899. 

The DNA match tree building has yielded some results - the Mobius strip twists further!  I've managed to connect two sets of DNA matches (a woman and her nephew; a man, his first cousin, and his nephew) to one set of common ancestors, Francesco Giuliano (1808-1869) and his wife Carmela La Palementa (1815-1875), making the woman and man 4th cousins 1x removed.  I've just merged a couple in my tree that I added from two completely different line building exercises (Francesco's parents via his sister Carmella), so now I am connected to those DNA matches via one marriage instead of two, but I'm not there yet.  :)

I have a few potential connections that I have no paper trail to support.  How many Nicola Chiariellos can there be in Omignano?  In records that list only a father, that name appears alone.  In records that list both parents, there is a Nicola Chiariello and his wife Luigia Giuliano.  My suspicion is that those are all the same Nicola, which would connect two more siblings to the two with the known mother of Luigia, but given the number of name repeats in this town, I don't think I can make that claim yet.  Maybe I will find another Chiariello record in the set to make those connections.  <fingers crossed>

The index spreadsheet is definitely helping with the DNA matches.  Being able to filter on surnames and find all the children from a particular couple is definitely a great time saver!  At least, when they are all entered.  The data entry continues....

O Little Town of Omignano....

My last name, Jordan, is an Americanization of the original surname of my great grandfather: Giordano.  Francesco Giordano came to America in 1889 from the little town of Omignano, Salerno, Campania, Italy.  My father's family knew him as Frank Jordan.

In October 2013 I discovered that Family Search posted unindexed digital images of the collection "Italia, Salerno, Vallo della Lucania, Stato Civile (Tribunale), 1866-1929" on their web site, including Frank's birth record.  Using this image set, I traced back a few more generations, which led me to my first set of direct line kissing cousins.  A pair of first cousins once removed married, so one set of 4th great grandparents double as a set of 5th great grandparents. (Does that count as killing 4 birds with 2 stones?)

Given the small size of the town and the high likelihood of intermarrying, it occurred to me that I might be related to quite a lot of people in the town.  And so, an idea was born, The Great Omignano (OMG, no!) Indexing Project!!!  But it was just an idea, and like many ideas, it sat on the shelf for awhile.  There are gold mines of information in all that Italian text, but to get to them, you have to filter though all that Italian text, an endeavor both time consuming and fraught with bad handwriting.  I worked back a few generations, concentrating on the Giordano surname and not much else, but did not roll forward to closer generations that lead to living cousins.  And after that flurry of excitement on the Italian hometown breakthrough, I moved on to other things.

Fast forward two and a half years. I'm starting to see Italian line DNA matches on the various testing sites.  Trying to figure out where these 4th cousin and further out matches fit in is tricky when my tree is not fleshed out both forward and back.  I found myself creating private individual family trees on Ancestry for each DNA match so I could try to build out their trees to figure out how we connect.  After spending two weekends building trees for OTHER people, I finally remembered my epiphany from 2013 and decided to take action on that idea.  The Vallo della Lucania images include births, marriage banns, marriages and deaths starting in 1866.  In 1875, the Omignano record books were converted to fill-in-the-blank forms, but prior to that, the entire record is one big handwritten paragraph.

So the past few weekends, instead of building out yet another DNA match tree (no doubt more of those will happen later), I turned to building spreadsheets.  I started with death records, capturing a number of data elements for each record, including the URL to the image.  For the totally handwritten 1866-1874 records, I've only captured the year, order number, name and URL information for about 200 people - those will take more work to decipher than the form-based ones to complete the index.  I have recorded all the information from the 1875-1887 deaths, about 320 people.  Since I was not focusing solely on the name Giordano, I actually added several more dates and people to my tree just from those records!  I'll take that as a sign that I'm on the right track.  Already I recognize the common surnames of the town, and they are an immediate clue of a potential shared line in the trees of my DNA matches.

So we'll see how long this project stays at the top of the to do list - hopefully I'll be able to finish some record sets before something else jumps the line.  And then I'll be able to use this spreadsheet index as a tool for looking up potential ancestors of DNA matches! 

Crossing the Pond - Italy!

I did a quick stroll through Family Search this evening and found they have posted images of records from the hometown of my great-grandfather Francesco Giordano (Frank Jordan), Omignano - I found my first Italian record, of my great grandfather's birth! (His is the last record on the page, the last for 1887.)

https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-1971-28331-2765-67

His parents are Giuseppe Giordano and Rosalia Cammarota. Now I need to learn some Italian....

Update 10/22/2013: Marriage record for Frank's parents, Giuseppe Giordano and Rosalia Cammarota: https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-1942-28331-2028-14

Update 10/31/2013: And Giuseppe and Rosalia were kissing cousins!!! His grandparents were her great-grandparents, making them 1st cousins 1x removed. This is the first set of married cousins I've found in my direct line. So now one set of 4th great grandparents double as a set of 5th great grandparents.