OTD: Marital Expatriates Can More Easily Regain US Citizenship

In my father's family tree, when Vilna-born merchant Samuel Markell (1885-1971) married Boston-born Marion Goldstein (1885-1961) in Revere, Massachusetts in 1911, the new bride took her husband's surname--and also his nationality. He was "Russian" and she became "Russian" at the moment of their wedding.

This was due to the US law known as the Expatriation Act of 1907, which tied a woman's citizenship to that of her husband. By marrying an alien, Marion Goldstein Markell was transformed into a marital expatriate for three decades. Samuel became a US citizen in 1923 but that didn't change his wife's status.

Changes under the Cable Act 

After World War I, and an outcry from US women who gained the right to vote starting in 1920, Congress passed the Cable Act of 1922 to restore citizenship eligibility to women who were marital expatriates. However, the women had to actually apply for naturalization as though they had not been American-born. Many did not. By 1936, US law streamlined the process of allowing marital expatriates to become US citizens. 

Changes on July 2, 1940

Finally, on this day in 1940, a new law amended the 1936 rules. Now women who were marital expatriates could more easily "repatriate" and regain their citizenship, no matter their marital status. They still had to take an oath of allegiance.

And that's why, in June of 1941, Marion Goldstein Markell filed the paperwork to regain her US citizenship. In September of that year, she took the oath of allegiance. Thirty years after losing her US citizenship, she was again legally an American citizen. 

"There Slumbers the Dust of our Father and an Infant Brother"

Traveling to the California Gold Rush in March of 1852, my husband's third great aunt Asenath Cornwell Larimer (1808-1897) wrote in her journal about family members who had passed away and whose burial places she would never see or never see again.

At top, Asenath and two of her children in the 1850 US Census, with unusually accurate info. She was indeed born in Canada (Hallowell, Prince Edward Island). She was 42 years old at the time of the Census, her son James Elmer was 10, and her daughter Nancy Elizabeth was 4. Three other sons were living with family and neighbors, helping as farmhands or learning a trade. She left all her children behind two years after this Census, when she and her brother John Cornwell (1812-1883) set out to seek their fortune in California.

In the first part of their journey west, Asenath and her brother boarded a steamboat that took them past Gallipolis, Ohio, where they had grown up. Asenath looked back on her childhood and thought about the family members she had lost up to that point. She wrote:

There slumbers the dust of our Father [David Cornwell] and an infant brother [unnamed baby Cornwell]. Oh how strangely scattered is the remains of those of us who are dead. Father and brother here [Gallipolis]; Mother at Macarthur's town [Phoebe G Goldsmith Cornwell, buried in McArthur, Ohio]; Sister, her children and my first-born at New Plymouth [Lucinda Cornwell Eggleston, Phoebe Eggleston, unnamed baby Larimer]; my husband [James Larimer], Elkhart, Indiana; brother David [Cornwell Jr.] in Feather River, California and none to care or mourn or look after his remains. 

I've looked for a tombstone or obit for David Cornwell Jr. but found nothing, not surprising in those Gold Rush days. No tombstones for Asenath's infant brother and first-born child, both dead before 1835. They are remembered today because she cared enough to write about them on page 2 of her Gold Rush journal. 

 "Tombstone" is this week's prompt for the #52Ancestors challenge by Amy Johnson Crow.