Usually I research other people’s families, not my own. However, doodling around one day, I discovered that my great-aunt Libby, born on Manhattan’s Delancey Street in 1898, was later stripped of her birthright citizenship for marrying an immigrant — the guy I called Uncle Fred. Years later, she regained her citizenship by naturalizing. But she would never again be a natural-born citizen in the land of her birth.
Delving further, I discovered that Aunt Libby was hardly alone. The Expatriation Act revoked the birthright citizenship of perhaps hundreds of thousands of US-born American women, insisting that by marrying, they had voluntarily taken on the nationality of their husbands.
A cautionary tale for today? Read my piece here.
