A person born in the United States is generally considered to be a natural born citizen whose citizenship can only be lost by intentionally relinquishing it. For the most part this is true. However, there have been periods of time in our history where there were some deviations from this norm, even to the point of a natural born citizen losing citizenship status based on marriage to a non-citizen alien. From 1907 until 1936, this was true for many American women.
Even today, those expatriates who obtain second passports by becoming a citizenship of another country, do not automatically lose their U.S. citizenship, so it seems odd that an American woman would lose her citizenship due simply to marrying a non U.S. citizen within the U.S. Odd or not, it happened. Furthermore, the loss of citizenship upon marriage to an alien man was not restored upon the husband's death. Quite a penalty to pay for love!
Family Nature
The reasoning behind this was that the U.S. had allowed alien women who married American men to become U.S. citizens, so the reverse logic should also be true. If the alien women took the citizenship of their U.S. husbands, then why should the U.S. women not be required to take the citizenship of their alien husbands?
So, in 1907 a law was passed that basically said that women derived their citizenship from their husband, regardless of where the women were born. This effectively removed the U.S. citizenship of a native born female who married an alien husband and gave her -- at least in the eyes of the U.S. Government -- the citizenship of her husband. The law was short lived but the effect of the law remained for several decades.
The Married Women's Independent Citizenry Act of 1922 effectively repealed the effects of the law of 1907 but did not automatically restore citizenship to those women who had lost it when they married. By an Act of June of 1936 (and a subsequent amendment to that Act in another 1940 Act) a form was finally provided by the the U.S. Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service which would allow a woman to apply to gain her lost citizenship back. Over the next two decades, many of these "expatriate" citizens applied and were able to regain their U.S. citizenship.
We should never take for granted the permanency of our citizenship. Our female ancestors who did so awoke one day to find that their natural born citizen status had been removed by the stroke of a pen. It's true that they had to marry an alien husband for that removal to occur, but prior to 1907 it would not have occurred. Only the legal requirements for citizenship changed, the fact of their birthplace had not. We can learn a lot from history. Learn from this one.
How Some of Our Female Ancestors Lost Their US Natural Born Citizenship Through Marriage to Aliens
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