The whole “Consular Report of Birth Abroad (CRBA)” addresses the technical aspect of citizenship records. (I imagine that there are similar loophole documents for many countries.)
But how do we keep any nationality charts from being skewed? (Not that Gramps currently HAS any such pie charting functionalities.)
What do you think about making the birth as the Citizenship country (perhaps adding “Foreign Enclave” as the description) and adding a 'residence as the actual place of birth?
Special circumstances:
Those born in Diplomatic or military Enclaves (or on such missions) are considered to be born on domestic territory.
I treat the Birth record as just that. A Date, Place and hopefully a Source/Citation. This is different than Citizenship even though the Birth often confers Citizenship.
Citizenship I put as a personal Attribute if it makes sense to do so. I only have a very few records with this information.
I agree with this idea of an attribute on citizenship. And concerning the source / citation, with a little luck it should be possible to find several, that of the country of birth and that of the consulate (s) of the country of citizenship of the parents.
But, there is two questions in Brian’s questions. The second question is what are the what rights related to the child’s country of birth are granted to the child? And what does he do with this right if there is one, in particular if he has to rule on it, as is the case in France?
But somewhere that will only add to Dave’s attribute. Maybe even create an event if this choice exists and has been done (or a right exercised) by the child and is dated.
The current law which has changed over time (in addition to knowing what the child is doing, it is also necessary to know the law of his time of birth and that of his majority … - another interesting subject could be how to record laws of a specific time) : if you’re born in France even from two abroad citizen and stay in France for 8 years you can choose to be French at 16.
I have no idea how you can accomplish what you seek but like the storing of DNA information as Attributes, I think that will be a potential way to go.
I have been tossing the concepts of Nationality versus Ethnicity around all day. Your charts display Nationality, but I have been thinking Ethnicity. But that is not a good fit either.
Case in point. I have 2nd Great-grandparents that were both born in Canada. But I have never considered them Canadians and from what I have learned neither did they. So in their case, how does where they were born affect the creation of the charts?
One was Flemish-Belgian/German with recent arrival to Quebec, the other German with recent arrival to Ontario with a long period of time having lived in Lancaster Co, Pennsylvania. In both cases, the families both moved once again to Massachusetts where they met. So I would consider their children 75% German, 25% Dutch. That they were born in Canada does not come into play.
As I said, no answers, just other things to have a think on.
Perhaps it is just an American bias, but I think inhabitants of the New World tend to omit the Americas from their nationality/heritage markup … except for indigenous. After all, we’re all immigrants.
I wonder how long that lasts? Of the 310 of my ancestors in 8 generations born since the founding of the USA, I know of only 16 born outside the country. Yet it wouldn’t even occur to me to include “American” in my nationality makeup. (Except when when my fellow Texas residents ask… then I’m a Pennsylvanian Yankee.)
Maybe it is that way everywhere? Does everyone omit their home nation unless their ancestors were truly indigenous?
I have a similar situation in my family - Irish immigrants to Canada married and raised their kids there, but after the father died the mother kids moved to the US and they all remained here for the rest of their lives. Based on memoirs from a cousin of theirs who followed the same path, I think they might have said they were “from Canada”, but also would have said that they were “Irish”.
In other words, the questions “Where are you from?” and “What ‘are’ you?” may get different responses from people, not just in the past but also today.
Another example – a cousin’s ancestors include German-speaking people with Polish surnames (they were from Prussia, and considered themselves “German”), and Slovenian people with German surnames (who considered themselves “Austrian” – Slovenia was a part of Austria at the time).
Having said that, I do think tracking an ancestor’s actual citizenship at the time of emigration can be useful, because it might shed some light on the historical context of the the event. But I don’t think I would ever use such data to say anything like “I’m 16% Holy Roman Empire!”.
Also, I realize that @DaveSch’s reference to DNA information was just to mention the use of attributes, but it reminded me of another point, which is that the DNA one inherits does not come in equal percentages from each ancestor in a given generation (except for the approximately 50/50 split for parental DNA), and in fact none at all from some ancestors.
I think it’s easy to mix up several concepts which makes it harder to record the data consistently through your DB:
Birth place: Which is a place or an area (depending on your information) which does not change. => Birth event place.
Nationality / Citizenship: Which is determined at birth differently depending on the country. It is also country dependent if and how you can acquire one and if you can have more than one at the same time. => Either person attributes or events if you want to record the time.
Ethnicity: Which is your gentetics and does not change through life. => Person attributes.
Identity: Which is the way you describe yourself and where you feel attached to. It can also change through life. => Either events to record the time or a person note e.g with custom type identity where you write down all details.
I’m currently only recording the birth places and citizenship only or in cases (A) that it was acquired or (B) wasn’t the same country as the birth place.
Citizenships can change, and multiple countries allow dual citizenships, , I think USA also allows it.
The easiest way to use that type of data in a “standard dataset” is as an attribute.
It is actually another great example of attributes that would benefit from having a date field.
Personally I add any citizenships I find as Events, to be able to register the dates, the prosess of applying for citizenships is another Event Type that benefit from a “Main - Sub Event” functionality.
If you use Excel, You can create those type of pie charts today by using the import xml function in excel, and import the Gramps xml, add each Gramps object type to it’s own worksheet, and create a new worksheet with the columns from the different worksheets that hold the information you need…
then create your pie charts based on that new table.
OR…
You can create a pivot table from columns you need, and base you pie charts on that.
I have not found a way to do the same in Libre/OOO…
Another way, if you know how to, is to use Plottr and Dash and extract data through the web api…
Or use Orange (you will need some comma or tab separated text files with data).
It gets complicated. If they were born before 1947, they probably wouldn’t be considered as “Canadian”. If anything, legally, they would be considered British subjects. The concept of Canadian citizenship wasn’t established by law in Canada until 1947.
My German and Dutch parents gave up their original citizenships when they became Canadian citizens back in the late 1950’s. However, since I was born in Canada a year before that, I can claim dual citizenship, Canadian and German. Possibly Dutch too.
