Up a Tree

 This week we switch over to my wife's, Sharon's, side of the family. As I learned after I married into the Reagan-Lackey-Womble clan, you could go just about anywhere in Texas and wind up finding someone she was related to. This is natural, considering many people in the southern and southeastern states seemed to have followed at least the second half of the Davy Crockett quote and headed for Texas in the 1800s. And a quick glance at Sharon's side of the tree shows a number of relatives who started out in Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky. And though it's not a southern state, many came from Missouri. If you ask Google where most of the immigrants to Texas came from in the 1820s, it will tell you, Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri.  In the early part of the century, many of these immigrants came to the state either by traveling the Mississippi River, presumably exiting in one of the states to the east and then heading our direction, or by the "Old San...

We looked at the origins of a national immigration policy in the last post. In case you didn't notice, nothing was said about how these immigrants became citizens.  Ellis Island, early 1900s This would be because state courts had jurisdiction over the naturalization process. Until national legislation was passed in 1906, as many as 5,000 courts across the existing 45 states. Not surprisingly, no standard procedures governed these courts. Even the oath new citizens took varied by court, from a simple statement rejecting the old country and pledging fealty to the U.S. to an oath using a list of promises contained in immigration. The legislation of 1906 established a bureau of naturalization, which over the years was part of the immigration bureau and a stand-alone department until well into the 20th century, when the departments were permanently joined. The scope of the Immigration and Naturalization Service has evolved to meet the changing needs of the nation, often in response to h...