u/sdobart

I've been researching my family's German citizenship claim and I'm down to three legal questions I can't resolve from the practice literature. Hoping someone here has seen these come up before.

The timeline:

Date	Event
1884	My great-great-grandfather emigrates from Germany to the US as a minor
1891	My great-grandfather is born in West Virginia
1893	My great-great-grandmother dies in November, the kids get split up; my great-grandfather goes to live with a foster family
1895	My great-great-grandfather naturalizes in September. By this point my great-grandfather has been boarded out since around his mother's death

From this point forward, things are straightforward, there is an un-broken paternal line from there down to me, all births in wedlock, no later loss events.

Paper trail on all of this is solid (the naturalization record recites "a native of Germany" renouncing allegiance to "the Emperor of Germany"). My great-grandfather was born before the naturalization, so he acquired German citizenship at birth - the question is whether/when he lost it afterward.

Question 1: which loss mechanism even applies to the father? Foreign naturalization wasn't itself a loss ground before 1913, so his loss ran through §21 either way: the plain ten-year absence clock (1884 + 10 = 1894, before he even naturalized), or the Bancroft treaty version that shortened it. Grill (1893) treats the Bancroft loss as operating inside §21, which is what makes the qualifier in my next question available at all, but I've seen that Seydel, Laband and Meyer disputed this. Does anyone know which way practice goes? Treaty loss inside §21, or a freestanding loss ground where §21(2) never comes into play?

Question 2: §21(2) of the 1870 law says the father's loss extends to minor children "soweit sie sich bei dem Vater befinden." Does the BVA actually apply that qualifier? Meaning, would a child who was boarded out with another family at the time escape the derivative loss? Or does practice just treat every minor as losing citizenship along with the father, full stop? One wrinkle on evidence: custody was never formally transferred (I checked, there is no guardianship or court proceeding of any kind), so this would rest on the factual record - the father was a lodger with no household of his own, and census and church records (baptism) put the boy with the foster family. Would that kind of showing be enough, or does the BVA want a formal instrument?

Question 3: Even if my great-grandfather escaped derivative loss, I've read that practice ran a foreign-born German's own ten-year absence clock from birth, which would mean loss around 1901. But the statute applies to Germans "welche das Bundesgebiet verlassen," and he was born in the US. He never left Germany because he was never in it. Anyone know of a BVA or court position on foreign-born kids and the pre-1913 ten-year rule?

Has anyone actually seen a Feststellung decided on any of these points, in either direction? Trying to figure out if I have any shot here, or if this claim isn't feasible (for these reasons, or something else that I am overlooking).

Thanks in advance!