Obtaining, losing, and regaining American citizenship: Presenter Hal Bookbinder

Meet and Greet: 12:30 pm

Short Society Meeting begins at 1:00pm followed by the presentation

Obtaining, losing, and regaining American citizenship

Speaker: Hal Bookbinder

Although a natural-born American citizen, on marrying in 1917 Sara Sacharow lost her citizenship. Years later she is naturalized. This talk discusses naturalization rules over the years, including the treatment of women, children, blacks, Asians, and Indigenous peoples. It even discusses how John Adams tried to avert Thomas Jefferson’s election by changing the laws of naturalization.

Hal is a retired information systems professional who continues to instruct at the university level. He has been actively researching his genealogy for more than three decades, identifying over 4,000 relatives and tracing two lines to the mid-1700s in modern Ukraine. He is a past president of the JGS of Los Angeles and of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies. Hal publishes a series of monthly articles on safe computing which are freely available at http://www.tinyurl.com/SafeComputingArticles. He and his wife, Marci, were raised in the Catskills of New York State, in the famed “Borsht Belt”. After attending New York University and a four-year stint in the US Air Force, they have lived in the Los Angeles area. In 2018, he made a journey to Ukraine, visiting various areas of the former Volhynia and Podolia in which his family lived for hundreds of years.

This program will be recorded and placed in the "members only" section