By Gladys Friedman Paulin, CG, Winter Springs
My client’s family immigrated to Canada from Romania about 1912. In 1920, they moved to the United States, entering at Portal, North Dakota in November 1920, and continuing on to Jacksonville, Florida, where they had family.
In 1927, the parents divorced. The husband remarried and moved to Brooklyn, New York. The U.S. census for 1930 lists the mother as divorced and living with her seven children in Jacksonville; all were listed as aliens. Part of my charge was to obtain naturalization records for the family. The papers for the father in Brooklyn were indexed online and easy to locate on LDS microfilm. The search began for those who lived in Jacksonville. First stop, the National Archives. There was no microfilm publication covering Jacksonville federal court naturalization records. Publication M1547 which covers much of Florida did not include Jacksonville or Duval County. A search of the Family History Library Catalog for Duval County provided only a record for military naturalization in World War I. U.S. court listings for Florida showed a federal district courthouse in Jacksonville in the Middle Florida District.
At this point, I enlisted local help and contacted C. Ann Staley, CG, who lives and works in that area. Ann checked the Duval County courthouse and found no records or index listings for my client’s family. She then visited the federal courthouse and was advised by the naturalization clerk that copies of those files could only be released to the naturalized person. And no, Ann could not check the index and neither would the clerk.
Several days later, I called the courthouse and ended up speaking with the same clerk, who wanted to send me to the local office of the Department of Homeland Security. [Explanation: the current U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service—USCIS—is an agency in the Department of Homeland Security.] I politely explained that I did not want current USCIS records, but U.S. court records from the 1930’s for individuals who were deceased. She said that she could only release copies to the person naturalized. I again explained that these people were no longer living and asked if I could obtain copies by sending the court a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. She quickly said yes, of course, and agreed that would solve the problem. I completed a form G-639 for the two individuals for whom I had death certificates, attached copies of the certificates to the forms, and mailed them to the address she gave me. Of course, the envelope was returned as not deliverable without a room or suite number. I called the courthouse again, obtained that information from the operator, and remailed my request.
The following Monday, I received a call from the same clerk stating that I could not have the information since I was not the individual who was naturalized. [BACK TO SQUARE ONE!] I then requested a written letter denying my request; she said she couldn’t do that; I explained that under federal law, a written FOIA request required a written response. She then said I would need to speak with her supervisor. [Hooray, I thought.] So she transferred the call and I left a message for a person whose voicemail message gave her name and title as Director of Court Operations. That director returned my call the following day stating that she had checked the court indexes and the surname I was seeking did not appear in their records. She then informed me that the period I was interested in was not handled by the current Middle District of Florida, but that Jacksonville had been part of the Southern District in that time period. When the new district was established, earlier naturalization records had been sent to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland! [Note: National Archives policy calls for court records to be held in the pertinent regional archive, not at the national level.] The director agreed to send me a letter and advise when the district had been changed, which she did. [1962]
At this point, I went back through my research log and papers. I rechecked NARA’s Southeast Region (Morrow, Georgia) Web site and did not find Jacksonville or any of its counties listed under those locations for which the region held naturalization records. I reread the report from Ann Staley and noted an LDS film number for World War I period naturalizations held at the Duval County courthouse. I went back to the Family History Library catalog and did a film number search. Lo and behold, up comes a list of all the items on that film including two covering naturalization records for several Florida counties; clicking on the one which included Duval County brought up a large record which included many films from 1920 to the 1950’s. It so happened that this was only days before a scheduled trip to Salt Lake City. There, in the Family History Library, I started going through those rolls of film starting in 1929 and continuing to 1948. Each film was labeled “Jacksonville Naturalization Records” and contained several volumes of records, all from the U.S. Southern district court for Florida in Jacksonville, each volume with its own index. I was able to locate the complete naturalization files for the mother and six of her children.
Lessons learned:
- Don’t take no for an answer.
- Go back and review everything in the file when it looks like you reached the proverbial brick wall.
- Always be polite.
- Always ask for replies, especially negative ones, in writing.
To cut this saga short, I have contacted NARA in Morrow, Georgia, who have confirmed they have the original files; when asked why they are not listed in NARA's online catalog, the reply was that now you know they are there! I have also sent a copy of the LDS catalog pages to the federal courthouse in Jacksonville and advised them that the records are in Morrow, NOT in College Park.
For all: The LDS catalog title is: “Declarations of intentions 1920-1967 and Naturalization Petitions, indexes 1892-1932 Duval, Hillsborough, Monroe and Marion Counties, Florida, and the first film number is 2110001. When searching the LDS catalog it will be found under the location Jacksonville, but not under Duval County or just Florida. I guess I forgot one of the basic rules for searching the LDS catalog: search under every possible applicable jurisdiction, not just the one where it is supposed to be!
Debra S. Fleming has been a practicing genealogist for nine years. She is the Genealogy Instructor for the University of South Florida OSHER Lifelong Learning Center where she has been teaching Genealogy Courses since early 2007. She is a graduate of Florida State University, where she majored in Creative Writing and minored in her passion, Religion and has attended the Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research (IGHR). She is currently a member of the Genealogical Speakers Guild (GSG), The Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) and the International Society of Family History Writers and Editors (ISFHWE). You can learn more about Debra S. Fleming at http://www.theancestrydetective.com/.
