Spotlighting a law that stripped U.S.-born women of citizenship

Good reminder of some of the past history of citizenship policy, and how people lost their citizenship, in this case due to marriage of an immigrant:

Daniel Swalm was researching his family when he came across a disturbing episode in immigration history. That discovery would lead to a move in the U.S. Senate to apologize for action the nation took more than a century ago.

Swalm discovered that under an obscure 1907 law, his grandmother Elsie, born and raised in Minnesota, was stripped of her U.S. citizenship after marrying an immigrant from Sweden.

Swalm had never heard of the Expatriation Act that required a U.S.-born woman who married a foreigner to “take the nationality of her husband.”

Swalm, who lives in Minneapolis, found out about the law when he stumbled across an alien registration form filled out by Elsie Knutson Moren.

“I could not figure out why Grandma Elsie had to fill one out, because she was born in the United States,” he said.

The law has caught others by surprise, too.

“There are all these people doing their genealogy, and they come across relatives who were declared alien enemies during World War I, and they’re trying to figure out why that would be if they were born in the United States,” said Candice Bredbenner, a history professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Spotlighting a law that stripped U.S.-born women of citizenship – latimes.com.