"My childhood was full of German traditions. Every year, my grandmother would visit from Berlin to take care of us during our summer vacation. She didn't speak English, so we spoke German all the time. We also visited my grandparents in Germany two or three times a year. Berlin was more than a city to me. It was a second home, filled with familiar smells, voices, and generations of family."
"But when my father and grandmother died in 1991, two weeks apart, everything changed. I was 24. Their deaths marked a turning point not just emotionally, but culturally. My use of the language faded. The trips stopped. Germany became a memory, vivid but distant. For decades, I assumed that part of me had quietly ended with them."
"One day, I wondered, "Could I get dual citizenship?" I had no idea how the process worked. I assumed it would be complicated or even impossible, but I decided to do some research. Through the Freedom of Information Act, I requested my father's naturalization records. When the documents arrived, one line jumped off the page: He became a US citizen on July 13, 1967. I was born January 26, 1967 - six months earlier."
I grew up bilingual with German traditions, frequent visits to Berlin, and a German-speaking grandmother who cared for us each summer. The deaths of my father and grandmother in 1991 ended regular travel and diminished my use of German, turning Germany into a distant memory. At age 58 I applied for dual citizenship and researched my father's records. Freedom of Information Act documents showed my father became a U.S. citizen in July 1967, after my January 1967 birth. That discovery confirmed lifelong German citizenship and rekindled emotional connection to heritage and my late father.
Read at Business Insider
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]