ARE YOU ELIGIBLE FOR ITALIAN CITIZENSHIP JURE SANGUINIS (BY DESCENT)?
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF OUR UNIQUE FREE PRELIMINARY ELIGIBILITY ASSESSMENT!
Do you qualify for Italian citizenship jure sanguinis (by descent)? This is the million-dollar question if you hope to be recognized as an Italian citizen through your Italian ancestors, and it can be a quite complex topic. No worries, though: our preliminary eligibility assessment service is free of any charge or obligation!
The good news is that the majority of the individuals who have one or more Italian ancestors qualify for recognition of Italian citizenship. In fact, Italian citizenship is one of the few citizenships that can be claimed with no generational limit. You can go back as many generations as you like as long as your Italian-born ancestor was still alive in 1861, the year in which Italy was created as a nation.
Under Italian Law, Italian citizenship is passed from one generation to the other as long as there is no interruption in the transfer of citizenship. In other words, if you can demonstrate that your Italian-born ancestor was still an Italian citizen at the time of the birth of his/her child. If that is the case, generally, each of your intermediate ascendants received Italian citizenship from his/her parent and, therefore you were also born with Italian citizenship. The fact that you and your intermediate Italian ascendants were born with US citizenship at birth does not disqualify you.
However, as you might already know, just having an Italian “bisnonno” or “nonno” may not be sufficient. You may have a “broken lineage” if the transfer of citizenship was interrupted somewhere along the line.
There are multiple ways the transfer could have been interrupted: a child in the Italian line born out of wedlock, divorces, and naturalizations (i.e., acquisition of a foreign citizenship) are all events that may disqualify you under the Italian citizenship law.
For instance, if your great-grandfather naturalized before the birth of your grandfather, or if your Italian grandmother gave birth to your father or mother prior to January 1, 1948 (the date from which women were considered able to transfer Italian citizenship to their children), you may actually not be eligible to apply for Italian citizenship.
Another disqualifying scenario could be an unrecorded marriage: if any of your male ascendants got married in a church but did not record the marriage at the civil level, you may be ineligible. In fact, under the Italian law, the father of the child is presumed to be the person married to the mother of the child at the time of birth; paternity for children born out of wedlock is more difficult to prove (generally, an official acknowledgment of paternity is required in such cases).
That said, a broken lineage does not necessarily mean you are definitively ineligible for Italian citizenship — there may be alternative avenues. Citizenship could have been transferred by marriage by your Italian-born ancestor to his American wife, who would have acquired Italian citizenship instantly and automatically via the marriage and then transferred it to subsequent generations.
If you don’t understand the legal requirements, have no time to go through tons of old family papers and conduct genealogy research, or don’t feel like organizing big family dinners to interrogate your uncle or your grandmother, have us check your eligibility for you.
How does our free eligibility assessment work?
Be prepared to provide us with information such as:
- Places and dates of birth, marriage, and death of your family members and ascendants.
- Any divorces that occurred in your family (divorce records are actually specifically required by most of the consulates in the US).
- Date or year of Naturalization of your Italian-born ancestor (only if known).
We have access to many databases and genealogy websites and, can generally find all the relevant information in the US and Italy, as well as in the UK, Argentina, Canada, and other countries to confirm your eligibility. The US, Canada, the UK, and Italy started recording vital events like births and marriages starting in the mid/late 19th century and millions of these records are now available online. You just need to know where to look — and we do.
To speed up the process, you can provide scans of all the available documents you have (they’ll be kept confidential at all times). In addition, we’ll ask you to fill out an eligibility evaluation form (available on our home page) or our “Family Chart”, which we will provide to you by email upon request. Our “Family Chart” is basically a Word document in which you can list all of your family vital events, starting from your Italian-born ancestor up to yourself and your children.
Please remember: the more you can find out and provide at the beginning, the easier it will be for us to provide our free eligibility assessment and the smoother your path will be. Don’t worry if you’re missing some key information — that’s what we’re here for.
We highly recommend that you share information and documents pertaining to all the Italian descent lines in your family. It is possible you may qualify through an ascendant you didn’t initially consider. It was very common for Italian immigrants to marry other people of Italian descent, so in many cases, our clients have more than one Italian line that can be used.
Even if you do not qualify for Italian citizenship, our preliminary assessment may turn out to be your chance to get to know your family history and find out interesting facts about your long-gone ancestors.
As they say, you need to get to your roots to be fully aware of who you are today.
ALWAYS REMEMBER, OUR PRELIMINARY ELIGIBILITY ASSESSMENT SERVICE IS COMPLETELY FREE OF CHARGE AND OBLIGATION. SIMPLY CLICK HERE TO GET IN TOUCH WITH US TO USE IT!
