Re: Ancestor worship

[Peter Kent <76711 -dot- 2557 -at- COMPUSERVE -dot- COM>]

>>Melissa Hunter-Kilmer <mhunterk -at- BNA -dot- COM> said:

Why are the male ancestors particularly helpful in this regard?

I'm not meaning to stir up a hornet's nest.  I'm just wondering.
Do you mean those ancestors who have one's last name?  Because
sometimes those will be female.  And not all male ancestors will
carry one's last name in any case.<<

Sorry, Mellisa, but in many countries the woman really didn't count. It was
assumed that she became a citizen of the same nation of which her husband was a
citizen, and that was that. The law in the UK, for instance, has always given
the wife of a British man the right to live in the UK, but it's only fairly
recently that a woman could bring her husband into the UK. (15 years or
something, I think.)

>>> Generally this will only help you in Germany . . . If you can
> show that several hundred years ago your ancestors lived in
> what later became Germany, you can get German citizenship
> quite easily--many Romanians, for instance, were able to do
> this (exactly how you prove it I've no idea).

Several hundred years ago?  My goodness.  That's very
interesting.  So I could go over there and get citizenship on the
strength of some ancestors who chose to leave Germany in the
1700s, but current Turkish guest workers who have chosen to be in
Germany for quite a long time could not.  Seems unfair to me, but
I'm sure that's my cultural bias.<<

Seems rather unreasonable to me, too. Israel's just as racist. If you are
Jewish, even of a race that has never lived in the holy land, you can become a
citizen more easily than a Palestinian whose family has lived there for
thousands of years can visit the area.

>>but then somebody else pointed out that there is already a superabundance of
English
speakers in that part of the world, so it might be hard for a
non-local person to get a job.  :-)<<

Ireland also has very high unemployment, so it may be quite difficult to get a
work permit.

Peter Kent