Passports and the Immigrant
By Shannon Combs-Bennett, Student Ok, I am chugging right along through the US Immigration and Naturalization Records course and modules 3 and 4 were very cool. Module 4 was a lot of new material for me, particularly since I have not spent a lot of time learning about Canadian border crossings. No one in my family (that I have found) ever came through Canada. My husband however is a different story. His great-grandparents nearly starved to death (according to his mother) trying to farm in Alberta from 1920-1922 before going on to Washington state to settle. While that was very interesting I was fascinated to read about the US passport regulations. Nowadays we take it for granted that if you want to leave the country you need to get a passport. It is a very simple process, and they are handy forms of government identification. I did not realize that this was not the law until 1941. Personally, I think passport applications are an underused resource for genealogists and should be used a heck of a lot more. Especially if you know your ancestor traveled a lot, either for fun or for business. I learned this last year when I helped a friend start her genealogy journey. Her great-grandfather traveled back and forth to Central America for work and the information on his application actually broke down a huge brick wall on where her family came from. She learned that his father was born in Scotland and what his name…