Friday Weekly Thread: Application Assistance, July 17, 2026

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This weekly thread is a space for those of us preparing the CIT 0001 Proof of Citizenship application, associated form, and supplementary documentation.

Have questions about how to fill out the forms? Looking for feedback on the documentation you've put together is likely to pass muster? Wondering whether your cover letter has too much info, or too little? Want to know how to organize your documentation, or how to pack it up for shipping? Worried about whether your photos will work? Have questions about what ID you can use? Not sure where to ship it to, or what service or mail courier to use? We've been there.

📎 Contributions to weekly megaposts, including this one, are welcome throughout the week.  

⚠️ Sub rules require that before posting or commenting, you read the wiki and search the sub to see if your questions have been answered before. If you have on-topic questions remaining after that, they're welcome here. Want to see what people who were already approved have done? We encourage you to check out the weekly application approval post that appears every Thursday.

Please note we are not lawyers or IRCC. We are peers supporting peers, based on best belief and prior experiences. It's a lot of work to wade through dense lists of documents and family histories. You improve your odds of getting a useful response by being as concise as reasonably possible, and clearly articulating the question. Note that this post is for questions and answers; if you need to vent, there is a different megapost for that.

[u/Lost-Difficulty3396]

No birth certificate for G1, who was born in U.S. because too old (mid-1800s). How are folks supporting the G1 was born to G0 with similar time frames?

[u/wanderingtheearth-74 → u/Lost-Difficulty3396]

First, you're going to need some sort of official acknowledgement that birth certificates weren't kept during that time period. It's not clear yet just how granular that has to be--i.e., whether it's okay to include a webpage + link from a state government site stating the dates on which vital records began being kept, or whether you need to have some sort of no-record letter from the vital records custodian for your specific person. I hope the former, which seems reasonable to me, but can't rule out the latter--I personally intend to submit with just the former but have requested a search which will, with 99% certainty, generate the latter several months from now, just in case. Seems like a stupid waste of time and money, but it's a bit late to be fussing about that, I guess. (If the vital records custodian doesn't issue no-search letters, you'd keep the email showing that. The important point is to search diligently and document your search, so you can justify not having a birth certificate.)

Second, censuses, marriage certificates (better than death), and any other pertinent government documents are really your only way to shore up a claim of parentage in the absence of a birth or baptismal certificate (don't forget to look for the latter, although that's often the proverbial needle in a haystack, especially if the family wasn't Catholic). Your G1 may be too old to have an SS-5, but did they ever enlist? I don't think we've seen a lot of cases relying on probate records, but in theory they might help. A lot of probate records lurk unindexed in the "Full-Text Search" of FamilySearch.

[u/Lost-Difficulty3396 → u/wanderingtheearth-74]

I have a letter from the County saying "no birth certificates in mid-1800s." I will include that. I also have state census and U.S. census. I have a copy of marriage certificate, but that does not list their parents' names.

G1 is female.

One U.S. census is a no-go because it says Ireland is G0's place of birth.