Citizenship by descent applications are unusual in requiring a complete, consistent paper trail across several generations. Each record has to be a certified copy, each needs an apostille, and each usually needs translating. The volume is manageable. The consistency is not.
What a set usually contains
- Birth certificate for every person in the line
- Marriage certificate for every married couple in the line
- Death certificates for deceased ancestors
- Naturalization records, or proof that no naturalization occurred
- Divorce decrees where applicable
- Court orders correcting any discrepancy
The problem is names
Immigrant ancestors were recorded inconsistently. A man recorded as Giovanni on his Italian birth record appears as John on his American marriage certificate and as Jno. on a census. Dates disagree by a day or a decade. Surnames gain and lose letters.
Consulates require these resolved, usually through a court-ordered amendment to the record, and that process is slower than everything else combined. Finding a discrepancy after apostilling twelve documents is the expensive way to discover it.
The sequence that saves money
Assemble scans of the whole set first and check them against each other before certifying anything. Names, dates, and places should agree across every document, and where they do not, that is the first thing to fix.
Records from several different states are normal here, and each goes to its own issuing state. We run those submissions in parallel rather than one after another, which is usually the difference between weeks and months. Our Italy page covers the specifics for the most common case.