What, you say? Here's the story, based on my late mother's papers, which I inherited, and a lot of family memory. On January 11, 1912 in Hamilton, Ontario, John Henderson and Maud O'Brien had a daughter, Mary Jane Henderson. That was my mother, although I've never seen the name "Jane" anywhere but her birth certificate - in life she was "Mary Jean," and as an adult was often simply called "Jean." (She died January 29, 2000.)
Her U.S. Certificate of Lawful Entry records that she entered the United States on September 27, 1920, in Detroit, Michigan, by ferry. She was 8 years old, traveling with her family. Her Certificate of Lawful Entry is dated January 19, 1943, she is now 31 years old. (The Certificate, by the way, gives her name as "Mary Jean.")
Why did the Henderson family come to the U.S. in 1920? My grandfather, John Henderson, was a photographer, and he had made a living during World War I by photographing miners at the Big Nickel Mine, in Sudbury, Ontario. They were producing metal for munitions in the war and wanted to send photos home to family. That fell off badly after the war ended, and he had a cousin with a ranch in Campbell, CA, so he packed up the family and came to California.
Next, I have mother's Application for a Certificate of Arrival and Preliminary Form for Petition for Naturalization (I wonder if they still use that name?). That form is dated July 1945, without stating a day. That form spells out her life in the U.S. to date - her family stayed in Campbell, CA for a couple of months in 1920 but moved into San Jose in November 1920, where they lived until 1933. She attended San Jose State but didn't graduate. In 1933 she moved to Vallejo, CA with her family. Her father's photography business wasn't going well in San Jose, and he thought he could do better business in Vallejo with the sailors at Mare Island Naval Shipyard.
Among the places of employment she listed on the Application were the U.S.O. Club - from 1942 to 1944 she was the secretary and bookkeeper. I'm now leaving the papers and going from memory. A sailor at the U.S.O. Club introduced her to his buddy, Lestle Ivy (yes, that name is correct), who worked at Mare Island Naval Shipyard as a laborer. He had moved to California in 1940, looking for work. And on August 16, 1944, in Reno, NV, he married Mary Jean Henderson. She filled out the Application the month before she got married.
[Correction: mother filled out the Application about a year after she married. She actually declared her intention to become a citizen in April 1943, the Application says so; it also lists my father as her husband, with the wedding date in 1944. I think she filed the Application in July 1945 because she discovered she discovered she was pregnant - I was born on April 2, 1946.]
Mary and Lestle had 2 children, Karen Ellen (me, born April 2, 1946) and my sister Susan Carol (born May 19, 1948). All that time, Mary Ivy was still a Canadian citizen. I didn't know that until I started researching this. Her Certificate of Naturalization says she became an American citizen on September 15, 1949. So it took her 4 years from the initial Application to become a legal citizen. (Well, there was a war going on for part of that.) Which means I might not qualify for birthright citizenship under 47's "definition." I'm not terribly worried, because my father was born in Missouri, and also because I don't think he can get that past the court. If he does, I may start looking into the dual Canadian citizenship for which I believe I qualify.
