As we regrouped in North Pole after our post-Fairbanks plans changed, we were still thinking about the same things that had led us to sell the house in Fairbanks. The issues had not changed and we still needed to figure out what we should do next. Once Bill had learned that he could get Irish citizenship by descent, he began gathering the documentation he would need. He first got birth, marriage, death certificates from the United States. Once we had those, it was time to try to get the documentation needed from Ireland. When we looked into how to do this, we discovered that we would need to send in a form with a year on it. They would look for records from that year and the year before and year after as well. We were left to guess a bit here, because we weren’t sure about his grandfather’s year of birth and while we had a date for his grandmother, we were aware that this might not be accurate, since somehow we learned that she had lied about her age on her marriage certificate as she was a bit older than her new husband. So we guessed for both of them and sent in the paperwork. They found nothing for that time frame for his grandfather. Records were often lost and at the time, Ireland was still colonized by the British, who were extremely brutal towards the native Irish people in many ways, including exporting food while Irish people starved to death. Birth records were easily lost or destroyed. It was suggested that we could try church records or submit another form with another year. This was not necessary, though, because they did find records for his grandmother. That’s all we needed. Even though we had all the documentation, we decided to wait until we knew what we’d be doing and where we’d be before sending in the citizenship application. It said it could take 18 months. Who knew where we would be by then? We were pretty sure it wouldn’t be in North Pole.
