RLP 294: Naturalization Records Part 3

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 294 Naturalization Records Part three. welcome to Research Like, a Pro a genealogy podcast about taking your research to the next level. Hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder Accredited genealogist Professional Diana and Nicole are the mother daughter team at family Locket dot com and the authors of Research Like, a Pro A Genealogist guide with Robin Wirthlin. They also co-authored the Companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA, join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research, and solve difficult cases. Let’s go.

Nicole (42s):
Today’s episode is sponsored by newspapers.com, your go-to resource for unlocking the stories of your ancestors. Hello everyone. welcome to Research Like, a Pro a genealogy podcast,

Diana (53s):
Hi Nicole. how are you today?

Nicole (55s):
Really good You know because I’ve just told you everything before we recorded all the fun things that I’ve been doing. How about you?

Diana (1m 4s):
Well, you better tell us some of those fun things. Everybody’s interested now and then I’ll tell you what, I’ll really quickly of what I’ve been doing, I’ve been doing a lot of things, but this morning I was reading in my book by Brooks Blevin on his series on the Ozarks about reconstruction after the Civil War. And it was just very fascinating to hear what it was like in the Ozarks. And this was primarily in Arkansas. This piece I was reading this morning and it was so bad. There was so much fighting amongst the people who had been confederates and those who had been union supporters. And so they said it was no better than the war during reconstruction, which is so sad and really makes me think that’s why so many of our people specifically who’d been living You know in Arkansas or in other areas in the south, picked up a move to Texas because they wanted to get out of all of that and fighting.

Diana (1m 60s):
I don’t know that Texas was much better, but it was more of a confederate state. So if they’d been confederates, they probably didn’t run into quite as much fighting with with the union supporters. So it just made me realize how, how hard it was to come back together as a country after the Civil War.

Nicole (2m 18s):
Right. What a difficult time. Well, good job reading from our friend Brooks Blevins. I feel like he’s our friend now because we always talk about his books.

Diana (2m 27s):
Yes, indeed. And his books are so well done.

Nicole (2m 31s):
And our other friend we were talking about earlier who is making me happy because of all the great work he’s done in South Carolina, Brent Holcomb, I have his book Marriage and Death Notices from Pendleton, South Carolina Messenger from 1807 to 1851. And in my 14 day Research Like, a Pro Challenge project about Sally Keaton, I have uncovered that her true married name is Reeves not River or arrives as it was transcribed by myself and others in the past. And then looking Reeves up in this handy dandy book, found two obituaries in the Pendleton Messenger in the 1840s. And both of those I think could be the in-laws of Sally.

Nicole (3m 11s):
So I wanted to get the originals because it didn’t say any relatives in the abstract, it just said eulogy, which means you need to get the original to read the whole thing, I think. And So I reached out to the South Carolina Library at the University of South Carolina on their website, website and asked if they could scan the originals for those issues. And they just got back to me and said, yes, and it’s free for the first hour of their research. So I’m so excited to get those.

Diana (3m 40s):
That’s so great. And you never know until you reach out to these onsite libraries or archives what they will do for you to help you with your research. So that’s exciting. And we were talking about Brent Holcomb and his contribution to research in South Carolina. ’cause both of us have used a lot of his works, his abstracts of the records, which have been fabulous. And I was able to meet him last summer when I did the South Carolina workshop and it was fun to see him in person and meet the person behind the name. We used these books and we’re so grateful for them. And it’s fun to see the the people that actually put the work into making these great books.

Nicole (4m 21s):
Absolutely. And in a time when there wasn’t a lot of record keeping for marriage and death information in the South Carolina up country, it’s really nice to have this because there’s just not a lot of other resources for marriages and deaths at this time period.

Diana (4m 37s):
Exactly.

Nicole (4m 38s):
Well, someday I hope to be like Brent Holcomb. I wanna make a book of abstracts, I just don’t know where and what time period. But it would be really cool to not only just be involved in a project like that, I just love being absorbed in a time period and reading all of the, the information and You know what it’s like when you’re in doing an indexing project, how fun that can be, and then to just help bring some records to light for people who wouldn’t be able to access them normally.

Diana (5m 4s):
Right. And I think you learned a lot from doing something in depth, let’s say if you wanted to do an abstract of all the court records in a county, and so you’re reading the court books or the court minutes and putting that all together into an abstract, just think how you would get to know all the people in the actual area and you’d probably run into the same names over and over and get such a feel for community. And I know Elizabeth Mills recommends doing something like this for really in-depth research to read all the court minutes to get to know the community and the associates. So You know if you want a project There you go, you could do that for one of your counties,

Nicole (5m 44s):
Right? Yeah. Someday goals,

Diana (5m 48s):
Something fun to think of.

Nicole (5m 49s):
Let’s do our announcements for the Research Like a Pro Webinar Series for this month on February 20th, we have Melanie Whitt coming back. She did such a good job last year in our Webinar series. We’re excited to have her sharing another client case from FamilyLocket Genealogists about identifying Henry Jacob Van’s mother, a 19th century DNA case study. And this is going to be a fabulous lecture where she dives into using DNA network graphs of matches at ancestry to find relevant clusters to identify a woman whose maiden name was unknown. And this is just a very cool project. So I, hope you’ll come. If you haven’t registered for our Webinar series for 2024, yet, you can do so on our website and it’s $60.

Nicole (6m 30s):
Also, we just wanted to let You know that for the upcoming conferences, we’ll be at Roots Tech February 29th through March 2nd, and we’ll also be exhibiting at the virtual NGS conference and speaking at that as well. So those are kind of the two big things that are coming up. As always, if you join our newsletter, you’ll receive periodical coupons and discounts for our books and products and courses.

Diana (6m 52s):
Well, let’s get to our topic of the day and we are going to talk about Naturalization. We’ve already had two previous episodes about researching naturalization. And so in this one we are going to talk a little bit more about what we do when we have ancestors in the 20th century and what we might be able to find for them. So if you do have an ancestor who became a United States citizen in the 19 hundreds, you’ll have a rich source of information about their origins, immigration residents, family, and more. This is because of the changes made to the naturalization process in 1906 by the US Congress.

Diana (7m 34s):
And so with that, we actually have standardized forms that request a detailed information. And there were more specific requirements for citizenship before 1906. There was little identifying information in the naturalization forms and I have found several of those and they’ll just say something like they are citizens or they were citizens of England or Germany. And you don’t get a specific place and you don’t get very much detail about them at all. But after 1906, we get much better information. So for this podcast episode, we are going to talk about the naturalization process after 1906, and we’re going to use the example of Adolf Salmon, a German immigrant, and we’ll talk all about how to find the records and you’ll be able to see their value and just a very interesting case study.

Nicole (8m 29s):
Perfect. It’s always helpful to hear a case study when you’re learning about a new record set. Well, let’s talk about the naturalization process. For an immigrant to gain citizenship, he would’ve had to do the following, filed his declaration of intention or first papers, met the residency requirement, usually five years, submitted a petition for naturalization, also known as second or final papers, took an oath of allegiance or naturalization oath received a certificate of citizenship. So an important consideration in this research is that before September 27th, 1906, a person did not have to file his declaration of intention and petition in the same court.

Nicole (9m 12s):
Any local, state, or federal court could hold the records. This is a huge challenge and one that I’ve encountered in client research before 1906. You have to check so many different courthouses, and it could be anywhere after September 27th, 1906. Naturalization was supposed to take place only in federal courts, but the transition didn’t happen immediately. So research should include the lower courts if no record is found in the federal courts. And sadly, there’s no central Index for naturalization records on the federal level. So it’s really important to create a timeline for the immigrant and determine what courts could hold the records because he or she likely visited a court near his home.

Nicole (9m 53s):
If you want to learn more, the National Archives has a great article called Naturalization Records that explains more about the process and what records are available.

Diana (10m 2s):
Well, as you said, when we begin the search for naturalization records, we need a solid timeline of the ancestor because that will give us clues to the possible dates for the various parts of the process. One of the best places to search are the federal censuses because from 1900 to 1940, each of those censuses asked about naturalization and the 1900 census asked for the year of immigration. So let’s just run through those so you get an idea of the information you can find in 1900, we have the year of immigration to the US and the number of years in the US and whether still an alien having applied for citizenship or naturalized.

Diana (10m 47s):
So this may be a column that you’ve just ignored when you looked at the census and they use AL for alien, meaning you are not a citizen and PA for first papers filed and NA for naturalized. So you’ll want to look for those terms in 1910. They are asking for foreign born males 21 years or older, whether they’re naturalized or alien. So you’ll see those same abbreviations, A-L-P-A-N-A, 1920. They want to know whether you’re naturalized or alien and the year of naturalization and 1920 is the only year to actually ask for the year of naturalization.

Diana (11m 29s):
1930 you have the year of immigration could be filled in and weather naturalized. And then in 1940 they ask for a birthplace citizenship if foreign born. And they not only ask if you’re naturalized having first papers an alien, or they might say, American citizen born abroad, so am then CIT for citizen. So you’ll get some little bit more information in 1940. So sadly, often the census information doesn’t correlate well. And this is because we do not know who the informant is except for 1940 where we have the little circle with the cross that tells us.

Diana (12m 13s):
And even though the head of household was supposed to provide the information, we all know that a wife, child, or even other household member could have been the informant. And Immigration information or Naturalization information is just probably something they did not know. And also even if the immigrant provided his own information factors such as memory and the length of time since immigration and naturalization need to be weighed because people may not have remembered those exact dates and they’re just going to give a guess. But there are other sources such as newspapers that can provide information and we’ll see this in our case study. There could also be home sources.

Diana (12m 54s):
Maybe that certificate of naturalization has been kept and passed down or a family story has been recorded.

Nicole (13m 1s):
Yes, You know the case I’m working on right now for a client is got a lot of information that it’s kind of hard to correlate and it’s, there’s a lot of people of the same name from the same country, Ireland. And it’s, it can be a big challenge to try to find the right information. So it’s important to really gather it all up and figure out what’s reliable and not well, let’s have a word from our sponsors newspapers.com dive into the newspapers where your family’s history unfolds as you search nearly a billion pages in seconds. newspapers.com offers an unparalleled treasure trove of historical newspapers providing a window into the past with papers from the 17th century to today.

Nicole (13m 40s):
newspapers.com as the largest online newspaper archive, it’s a gold mine for anyone seeking to uncover stories from the past. Whether you are a seasoned genealogist or just starting your journey, newspapers.com makes it easy to search for obituaries, birth announcements and the everyday stories that shaped your family. It’s like having a time machine at your fingertips. And here’s the best part, our listeners get an exclusive offer. Use promo code family Locket for a 20% discount on your subscription. That’s FamilyLocket at newspapers.com. Sign up today@newspapers.com and embark on a journey of discovery. Alright, well let’s dive into our case study of the German immigrant Adolph Salmon. He lived from 1869 to 1937, creating a timeline for Adolf Salmon included gathering census records, city directories and newspaper announcements as a traveling sales located in St.

Nicole (14m 34s):
Joseph, Missouri, Adolf and his wife Ruby, were listed yearly in the city directory and often in the news, usually in the society pages. Despite much information about his livelihood, the question of his immigration and Naturalization remained, when did he immigrate and on what ship? Through what port did he become a citizen of the United States? And if so, when starting with the census records, let’s see what we can learn.

Diana (15m 0s):
So let’s start with 1900 and on seven June, 1900, the census enumerator visited the home of Adolph and Ruby Salmon and reported the following information. Now as I was analyzing this, I hypothesized that the servant Emma, who was living in their home, likely gave the family information because she didn’t know very much about the family. So there was no birthplace given for Aada and she probably knew he was foreign born, but didn’t know a specific country for him. Likewise, there were no birthplaces given for the parents of any household member except for Emma’s. And she records her mother’s birth in Missouri.

Diana (15m 42s):
So often we have to just do a little detective work or some good analysis to try to think who might have given that information. Now we have Adolph. He’s age 30, he’s been married for four years. He is a salesman and sadly there’s no immigration year listed in that important column. And then we also have his wife, Ruby, she’s a 20. We learned that she had two children and two are living. And both of those children are then listed Carl and Eugene. And then we have Emma who was the servant, and we get to see that her mother was born in Missouri. That is all we have. And so that source that we had hoped for in 1900 about the immigration year is not listed.

Diana (16m 26s):
It was unknown.

Nicole (16m 27s):
That is hard to see that when you’re hoping for something really useful and the column’s there, but it’s just blank. How often does that happen with death certificates where you’re hoping to see the parents’ names and then it’s blank or it says don’t know.

Diana (16m 40s):
Yep.

Nicole (16m 42s):
Well, let’s see what the 1910 census said. The 1910 enumeration revealed the household of Adolf and Ruby Salmon with their four children. And the first mention of Adolfs birthplace as Germany, there was an immigration date, it was listed as 1870, but this was probably incorrect as Adolf would’ve been only a baby in 1870 was Adolf naturalized by 1910. This is what it showed in the citizenship column. The research showed that he was not, perhaps Ruby gave the census enumerator the information and incorrectly stated his citizenship information. So the details from the 1910 census are that Adolf Salmon was age 40, had been married for 14 years, born in Germany with parents born in Germany immigration in 1870.

Nicole (17m 31s):
The letters Na for naturalized in that column. And his occupation was a buyer of retail dry goods and he speaks English. Ruby Salmon was age 31. She was listed as having four children and four living. She was born in Missouri and with parents born in Missouri and in English speaking Canada. Then we have the child, Harold Salmon, age 13, born in Missouri, Eugene Salmon, age 11, born in Missouri and Morton and Esther Salmon ages six and two, both born in Missouri as well. So this was a great census for giving us information that perhaps he was naturalized. But we have a question about the immigration date.

Nicole (18m 11s):
Was it really 1870 or not?

Diana (18m 14s):
What about the 1920 census for Adolf Salmon? This is one of those situations where although he should have been listed with his family, he was not. And even though we did a page by page scan in the two locations where city directories had placed them both in 1919 and 1921, the family could not be located. So instead there was a Samuel Lamb Dow at the address for 1919, and there was a Margaret Great in 1921 where Adolph was elicited in the 1921 city directory. So perhaps they moved away for just a year or they were missed.

Diana (18m 57s):
We don’t ever know what happens when we just cannot find a family. And perhaps someday they’ll show up. But there was no family in those areas doing the page by page scan.

Nicole (19m 10s):
Hmm. Yeah, maybe they moved, who knows? But that is interesting that you have a O’S location in 1919 from that news article and then in 1921 from the city directory, but somehow they just weren’t listed and maybe they were renting from that guy and then nobody was home when the enumerator came. So someone just said, oh yeah, that guy owns the house. Who knows? But too bad they weren’t listed

Diana (19m 33s):
And there was no city directory issued for 1920 of St. Joseph Missouri. And so we couldn’t check to see maybe if they showed up in a city directory, which I love city directories because you get that run every year if you’re lucky in some of these bigger cities. Yes, but not there either.

Nicole (19m 51s):
Well, in 1930, Adolf and Ruby had moved to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and lived with their son Harold at 24 0 2 12th Street. The 1930 census also asked about citizenship. And the column for Adolf indicated unknown for both the year of immigration and whether naturalized the informant could have been Harold or his wife Betty, who probably wasn’t sure about Adolfs citizenship. So answered unknown, AOL’s occupation was still traveling salesman at the age of 61 and Harold worked as a music teacher. Both men were actively working an important fact during the Great Depression that saw large numbers of unemployment. So the household included Harold, age 32, Betty May Salmon, age 26, Eleanor age 10, Peggy, age six, Harold D and age one Adolph Sam, age 61, born about 1869, born in Germany with the unknown immigration and naturalization information.

Nicole (20m 48s):
And then Ruby age of 44, born about 1889 in Missouri.

Diana (20m 53s):
Right? So after looking at the censuses and hoping for some good information, we really didn’t find anything that was very conclusive. Pretty much everything was unknown and the two facts that were given that he had immigrated in 1870 and that he was naturalized don’t really seem to play out as we will show you in the research So now we look at other records and we learned that Adolf died on March 7th, 1937 at his residence of six years. So he is not going to be on the 1940 census. And interestingly, he had moved to Chicago, he was living on 1504 East 86th Street, and the coroner listed the cause of death on the death certificate as chronic myocarditis.

Diana (21m 43s):
Coronary sclerosis in the manner of injury is Addison’s disease. So this led me to believe that maybe his health had been failing for some time, but no information on the certificate showed how long the informant for the personal information Mrs. H Orth reported a O’S wife to be Ruby Salmon. So we know this is the same ado Salmon You know we always wanna make sure we have the correct identity and putting that together with his wife gives us that little bit of confidence in that. And on the death certificate, we get a AOL’s date of birth, 17 September, 1860, age at death, 76 years, five months, 20 days.

Diana (22m 28s):
His profession. He was a retired salesman who last worked in 1931 and he had spent 40 years as a salesman born in Hamburg Germany and his father Michael Salmon, born in Hamburg and his mother, Esther Simon, born in Putan, France. So really interesting to get all of those details but with no naturalization or immigration information still given except for the connection to Germany and perhaps Hamburg if the informant knew what she was talking about. So what else can we go to

Nicole (23m 3s):
Newspaper articles?

Diana (23m 5s):
Well, when World War I broke out in Europe, many German immigrants, as you would imagine, wanted to show their allegiance to their new country. And there were some very interesting articles about Adolf Salmon in his hometown of St. Joseph Missouri that gives some more clues on four February, 1918. The title of the article, the big headline was German Aliens Here are enrolling Today. They were having a registration at the central police station and the article says this was done in a a friendly manner. Every German born male resident of 14 years or more who was not naturalized must register sometime this week.

Nicole (23m 47s):
Oh wow.

Diana (23m 49s):
So that’s so interesting. And of course this is World War I and it’s 1918, it’s toward the end of the war, but I believe the US had entered the war by this point. And the article goes on to say the registration of German aliens in St. Joseph began this morning at Central Police Station and will continue all week closing at eight o’clock Saturday night. The registration was announced to open at six o’clock and at seven o’clock eight off Salmon a salesman living at 3 0 6 South 13th Street presented himself for enrollment. Upon reporting at the police station, the prospective registrants are sent to Chief of police Thomas Moore, who gives them the proper blanks and explains the details of registration.

Diana (24m 34s):
Those who do not understand the formula have their blanks filled out by the chief’s secretary. The applications are then ushered into the bertillon room where they’re photographed, fingerprinted, and finally registered by Detective Pat Ryan, head of the Identification Bureau. No difficulties in interpreting the regulations to the aliens or in completing the registration of those reporting were experienced this morning. So can you imagine that such an interesting window into the history of what was happening during this time for these Germans?

Nicole (25m 4s):
Wow. And that is such a fun newspaper article to have. Not that it was a fun event that was they were going through, but like you said, it’s just such a good window into the past and I love that it was done in a friendly manner, but wow. And that gives us such a helpful piece of information that we’ve been seeking about Adolf Salmon’s naturalization status.

Diana (25m 27s):
Exactly. And I think it’s so fun that they opened at six o’clock and he was there at seven o’clock, so it sounds like he wanted to make sure he this was taken care of and he wasn’t going to wait around or he wanted to get it over with so he could get on with his work because he You know he har seems like he worked very hard. So really interesting. Now going back to the census records, he had said in 1910 he was naturalized or whoever the informant was said he was naturalized. But we can see that he was not since he was reporting to be registered because You know he was a German alien.

Diana (26m 7s):
However, yeah, it does clearly say resident of 14 years or more who was not naturalized must register sometime this week. All right, so let’s read a few more articles. So there are two more articles that show that Adolf had petitioned the court for citizenship and the hearing for his application was scheduled. So one is titled A Few Noble American Names. And there article reads Federal court convened in this city on Monday with a very large docket, especially of liquor violators. Fewer people were up for naturalization than usual. Here are the names of a few of those, those who applied for papers in the court. It is easy to locate most of them.

Diana (26m 48s):
And then Adolf Salmon is in that list. Then another article says, fewer seeking papers, only 25 US naturalization cases. And this article reads 25 applications for citizenship papers will be acted upon in federal court, which will open in St. Joseph Monday morning following the usual order of procedure. These cases will come up shortly before noon. This is an unusually light naturalization docket. The persons whose petitions for citizenship will be heard are, and then there’s a list and Adolfs Salmon is among them. So we can see that he was going in to apply for his first papers. He was starting the process of Naturalization.

Nicole (27m 31s):
That’s so neat. Well, I looked up this on newspapers.com and it was really easy to find the original newspaper here. I just typed in his name, Adolf Salmon and the year 1923. And one of the first issues that came up was the one you’re referencing about fewer seeking papers. And it’s Friday, September 14th, 1923. And it’s really neat to see this newspaper. It has like pictures of finished farmers on the same page and just what a great newspaper, the St. Joseph News Press from 1923. It’s just such a great window to the past. Well, how wonderful that the answer to this research question was found in a newspaper.

Diana (28m 11s):
And isn’t it interesting, it was five years after he went in and was registered for being You know a German alien, not a citizen. So it certainly did take him some time to start this process, which makes me wonder why he is finally getting to it.

Nicole (28m 26s):
Yeah, it is interesting to consider the factors that would’ve caused him to go in at what time and You know the war was over and then in 1923, obviously. So who knows, he probably didn’t enjoy the experience of having to register as an alien in 1918. And maybe because of the war things were kind of on hold for naturalization. Who knows?

Diana (28m 46s):
Yeah, perhaps he just felt like it was finally time. We’ll never know. But it’s fun to read more of the details about his naturalization.

Nicole (28m 55s):
Well, with the information gleaned from the newspapers that Adolf Salmon had completed an application which was to be acted upon in federal court, searching broadly on ancestry.com in the immigration category found a reference to an Adolf Salmon in the Missouri Western District Naturalization Index. These Index cards were created by the US Department of Labor, immigration and Naturalization service, and referenced naturalizations filed in various federal, state and local courts in Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma. The Index card for Adolf Salmon are actually Solomon, I said that wrong.

Diana (29m 33s):
Yeah, sometimes his name was Solomon and sometimes it was Salmon. Oh,

Nicole (29m 36s):
Well, Adolf Solomon as listed on the card, his Index card gives additional details about his life and naturalization attempt. Born in Germany on September 17th, 1869. Adolf arrived in the United States on April 2nd, 1890, which makes me think like maybe the 1870 and the census was really supposed to be 90. Who knows, maybe it was just hard to read or they just wrote it wrong. While he was residing at 7 0 1 North 24th Street, St. Joseph Missouri and seeking naturalization at the US District Court in St. Joseph Witnesses, BJI, Colts and Louis Ocher were also of St.

Nicole (30m 17s):
Joseph Missouri. The card shows naturalization crossed out and denial typed instead. The back of the card indicates the reason as non-pro short for a non-pro quitter, meaning a judgment was entered not in favor of Adolf because he had not continued his action or appeared in court.

Diana (30m 33s):
So seeing that you wonder what happened, why didn’t he not follow through with this? So even though that Index card gives you some good information, we always wanna keep seeking the original record and what would happen if we could find that original application. So the first step is to figure out the court where Aada made his application. And the Index card does give us the clue that it was the US District Court of St. Joseph Missouri So. now we know which court would hold the records and we also have the place of St. Joseph Missouri and we have the date of denial of March 2nd, 1925.

Diana (31m 13s):
So this means that he had filed his petition of naturalization before that date, and there is a number at the top of the Index card that likely has some significance, but at this point it’s hard to know what it is. And that number is 1 8 5 5 dash p dash 6 7 6. So a really good place to start with a search like this is the family search catalog, which has microfilmed many Naturalization records and doing a keyword search for district court. St. Joseph Missouri Naturalization brought back four results and I could see that I wanted the top hit of Missouri Buchanan County St.

Diana (31m 54s):
Joseph Naturalization records 1907 to 1976. So we had the correct location, the correct court, and the correct timeframe. Clicking on the top hit I was directed to the catalog page and it indicated that this was a digital capture of original records at the National Archives and Record Administration in Kansas City Missouri. And as so many times with the family search catalog, there was a long list of collections to explore with the dates ranging from 1907 to 1963. There were a lot of different titles. And so I’m going to read these so those of you listening can get an idea of what types of records you might be able to find for your ancestor.

Diana (32m 37s):
There were certificates of loyalty, oath of allegiance applications, naturalization certificate stubs, petitions for Naturalization, declaration of intention for citizenship, military and overseas petitions for naturalization recommendations on naturalization petitions and court orders and petitions for naturalization transferred from other courts. Wow,

Nicole (33m 1s):
That’s a lot.

Diana (33m 3s):
Yeah, a lot of different things. But the most records were the certificate Stubbs petitions and declarations. And because the Index card showed a DO had been denied for his petition, I decided to start looking through those records and we could narrow a range to 1918. When the newspaper article came out in 1923 with the date of denial, So I decided to work backwards and started in 1923 and browse the digit digitize record set, which was titled the US District Court for the Western division of the Western District of Missouri petitions for Naturalization volume 8 19 21 to 1923.

Diana (33m 45s):
So as you might guess, there were lots and lots of different microfilms. And the best part was that I saw this volume had an internal Index, which we always want to look for those internal indexes. And it listed Adolf Salmon and he was on page 86, he was number 676. And then I figured out that that’s the number that was on the Index card. Ah, 6 76. Nice. So that looked correct. And then I did the trick of jumping head in the microfilm found page 86 and found four pages of images showing ADOS original petition and declaration of intention, which was always so exciting when you find what you want in the microfilm Yay,

Nicole (34m 26s):
Especially

Diana (34m 26s):
When you’re kind of browsing, had the intro Index, but you’re still looking. And the front of the petition gives personal and immigration information and affidavits of Adolf and his witnesses

Nicole (34m 37s):
So satisfying when you find what you’re looking for, especially when it’s been imaged.

Diana (34m 42s):
Yes. So let’s see what it actually says. It was number 6 76, page 86, and it’s the district court of the US at St. Joseph Missouri. It’s the petition of Adolf Salmon and we have his address 7 0 1 North 24th Street, St. Joseph Missouri, occupation salesman, born 17 September, 1869 at Hamburg Germany immigrated from have France on 22 March, 1890 and arrived at New York on two April, 1890. On the vessel. La Champa declared an intention to become a citizen on seven April, 1917 at St.

Diana (35m 22s):
Joseph Missouri in the circuit court of Buchanan County. Missouri wife is Ruby Salmon. And then we have his four children, their complete birth dates and where they are all residing now. And then after the family information, we get that Adolph four swears allegiance to the German Empire is able to speak the English language and has resided continuously in the US for five years at least immediately proceeding the date of this petition. And then we have affidavits for Adolf. So we have BJ IOLs and Louis Oaks or Ox, and they both say they have known him to have resided continuously in the US since January 1st, 1905.

Diana (36m 4s):
And they signed that. That is so fun. And if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll see that we actually get information about his immigration. We get a date that he left France and arrived in New York and the vessel, which is great. And also he declared his intention to become a citizen, he says in 1917, which was before the newspaper article in the registration. So it sounds like he had started his naturalization process.

Nicole (36m 34s):
That is so cool. And what an exciting find to find the exact date of immigration and the vessel.

Diana (36m 41s):
Exactly. So then we also have his declaration of intention, which is right there in the file, which was Microfilmed as well. And this one was from Buchanan County. And in this one we get his personal description. He was white, fair complexion, five feet, four inches, 155 pounds, gray hair, black eyes, no visible distinctive marks. And then again we get his birthday birthplace and his current address and that he immigrated from Hamburg Germany and that he is married to Ruby Salmon and he is renouncing all allegiance to William II German Emperor.

Diana (37m 23s):
And we get his arrival in New York on two April, 1890. All right. So what about that denial that is listed on the Index card? Well, the final document in a O’S petition file was supposed to include his oath of allegiance and order of the court admitting the petitioner. Instead, his petition was dismissed. So it appears he never appeared in court to make his oath and therefore was not granted citizenship. He had three continuances giving him the opportunity every six months to appear. And finally after two years his case was dismissed. So I hypothesized that during this time he was traveling as a salesman and maybe he was just never able to make his court date.

Diana (38m 4s):
So even though he spent this time and effort to become a United States citizen, he never completed that final step that ensured his right to citizenship. However, we have the new information gleaned from the petition about the vessel that he arrived on. And of course, as soon as I saw that, I went searching for the ship’s manifest. And so far that has not surfaced. So maybe that ship’s manifest was lost or it hasn’t been microfilmed or who knows, but we now have information about his voyage or his ship and his date. We just don’t have the actual list of the ship.

Diana (38m 47s):
So doing this project was so fun to learn more about his naturalization and finding those actual documents gave us his physical description information about his wife and children, residents, and was just a great find.

Nicole (39m 3s):
Wow, what a great case study of naturalization records. Good job finding that.

Diana (39m 7s):
Yeah, it was a fun project and I love the newspaper research that gave us the clues. So we really do want to find every clue we can before we go searching in the court records because it can be like a needle in a haystack unless you really haven’t nailed down what you want to search for and the actual court you want to search in.

Nicole (39m 27s):
Right. That’s such a big takeaway is greeting that timeline, getting every detail you can from all the different types of records so that you can narrow down your search of it.

Diana (39m 38s):
Right. And when you do find the records, it’s really satisfying, especially if it’s after 1906 and you get all of these details.

Nicole (39m 45s):
Alright, well thanks everyone for listening today. We hope you enjoyed our discussion about naturalization records and we will talk to you again next week. Bye-Bye.

Diana (39m 54s):
Alright, bye-Bye everyone.

Nicole (39m 57s):
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