Jump ahead to Jan of 2004.....

One weekend Erin (my fiance) and I were talking about living abroad. We had traveled to Italy in the Fall of 2003 for vacation and it was awesome. Again, we realized that the best chance of getting oversees was if one of us could work freely in the EU. I decided to look again online. This time I came across a website called myitaliancitizenship.com. I followed their instructions to see if I qualified for Italian citizenship. One of the first things I noticed was that it said that I could in fact apply through my great grandfather as long as there was a direct bloodline to him and he was born in Italy. I couldn't believe it! In fact, I didn't believe it and I knew there had to be a catch. Well, there was.

I then read what I feel is the most important piece of info. If my great grandfather was born in Italy and then naturalized in the US BEFORE my grandfather was born, then he would have given up his Italian citizenship and therefore never passed it down to my grandfather. I had no idea what the answer was to this. Unfortunately my grandfather had passed away a few years ago and my immediate family wasn't sure of the specifics.

But before I began to dig deeper, one thing was nagging at me. I had read about the dual citizenship requirements from the Italian website, but I had never looked at what the US said about being a dual citizen.......