After researching my family, it has become clear that quite a few of them
were lying about immigration year (to appear as if they had arrived
earlier). In addition, I noticed that quite a few male relatives were lying
about their age. What I noticed was that the immigration year/age skew
usually (misleadingly) placed them at about age 14 upon their arrival. I
read somewhere that in the early 20th century, getting citizenship was much
easier if you had arrived before about age 15, which would seem to explain
this phenomenon.

Lavie Meron

Rick Hyman [mailto:bikerick@...] wrote:

I am trying to find a passenger manifest for a likely relative -- Aran
FELDMAN -- who was naturalized October 4, 1886 in the Superior Court of the
City of New York. I found a manifest (ship -- Kaiser) leaving Hamburg for
Liverpool and then the US on December 2, 1881 that Aran FELDMAN is on. Could
this be the same person -- i.e., could Aran have received his citizenship in
a little short of five years? In other words did the Court check passenger
arrival papers back then to determine if the applicant was being truthful as
to how long he'd been in the country or did they loosely interpret the five
years?

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