My Dad's big day!
So, yesterday my Dad officially became French! Yay!
He will turn 80 this year but was determined to get his naturalisation done. It was a long gruelling process but he stuck with it and got all the papers (including a letter from our coughillustiouscough President Sarkozy) yesterday in a ceremony with about 50 other people.
Poor guy, for years people had said it would be easy since he and my mother (who is French) had been married for so long. Turns out that was the problem! They had been married for TOO long! French man could easily give his citizenship to a foreign wife, but it wasn't true the other way around until 1968! The law was not retroactive and obviously they were married before that. So he had to go through the whole painful process the same way any other immigrant or asylum seeker has to.
And the paperwork...what a nightmare. Things like his father's birth certificate were unfindable. My grandfather was born in Larissa Texas in 1881! Larissa Texas doesn't even exist anymore!
But it is done and now he is doing the paperwork for an ID card. More paperwork....sigh...
He will turn 80 this year but was determined to get his naturalisation done. It was a long gruelling process but he stuck with it and got all the papers (including a letter from our coughillustiouscough President Sarkozy) yesterday in a ceremony with about 50 other people.
Poor guy, for years people had said it would be easy since he and my mother (who is French) had been married for so long. Turns out that was the problem! They had been married for TOO long! French man could easily give his citizenship to a foreign wife, but it wasn't true the other way around until 1968! The law was not retroactive and obviously they were married before that. So he had to go through the whole painful process the same way any other immigrant or asylum seeker has to.
And the paperwork...what a nightmare. Things like his father's birth certificate were unfindable. My grandfather was born in Larissa Texas in 1881! Larissa Texas doesn't even exist anymore!
But it is done and now he is doing the paperwork for an ID card. More paperwork....sigh...