Just when I think I have the whole EU Country X citizenship thing sorted out I find a new wrinkle.  This time, questions about the legitimacy of my grandfather.  Apparently EU Country X insists that to claim citizenship, all people in the ancestral line must be legitimate.  That is, born inside of a legitimate marriage.  There is a question, albeit a solvable one, that my grandfather may have not been born into such a marriage. 

All the documents I have show he was born inside of a marriage but the issue becomes one of finding out if my great-grandmother was eligible to re-marry after her first husband.  Everyone says she was divorced, but then she used her first married name on the marriage license to my great-grandfather (marriage number two). 

The issue is obvious, right? 

A cousin told me that the first husband died shortly after the divorce.  I was thinking to myself, 1. Jackpot!  Go find the death certificate and hope he died before my grandfathers parents were married… and 2. Damn!  Was my great-grandmother the black widow of California?  Every man she married (three total) died *well* before she did.  The first husband sometime in the 1910’s, the second in the 1920’s and the third in the 1950’s after marrying in 1946.  She died in 1979.

Fortunately for me, it sounds like the documents I need are housed somewhere in my Swiss village, as Ed called it, in California.  All I need to do is find them.  I’ll start with the death record and see what it says as the divorce record will be much harder to locate.

I’m off to California tomorrow night, where I’ll only have access to my parents two tin-cans and a string Internet connection.  Updates will be sparse until the first of the year.  So if you don’t hear from me.  Have happy jolly holiday!

Oh hell, that’s the politically correct version.  I’m tired of the PC world we live in.

Merry Christmas!