Becoming Croatian

[firefighter ontheside]

About 4 months ago I learned that I might be able to become a Croatian citizen.  It's called citizenship by descent.  If you can show the records that show direct descent from your self to a Croatian emigrant, then you can apply for citizenship.  At first I thought, that's awesome, but it can't be possible to find my great grandfathers birth record in Croatia in 1879.  At that time and when he left Croatia with my great grandmother and their first child, my great uncle Antun, Croatia was a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.  My wife got me onto the Familysearch website and I began searching.  To my amazement, the site has millions of records from that time and so much more.  The site is an extension of the Mormon church and they have a calling to help people know their ancestors.  After about a week of looking thru the records I found his birth record.  I also ended up finding his parents and all of his siblings.  I've found so much there.  In America I needed his death certificate, my grandpas birth certificate from 1914, my dad birth certificate and finally my own.  I had to order a certified copy of my great grandfathers birth record from Croatian archive.  That took 5 weeks to arrive.  His name was Josip Modrušić.  I am named after him in my middle name.  I'm named after my dad.  My grandpa was Joseph and he was named after his dad.  And of course my oldest has the middle name.  Through this genealogy research, I have found some relatives in Croatia and one of them will do the necessary translations I need to have done.  She is a govt certified translator.  We go to the Croatian consulate in Chicago in June to turn in all paperwork.  Wish us luck.

[Hilltop366]

Interesting stuff looking back at your family tree, and best of luck in your endeavours.

I would suggest looking into any tax implications though unlikely to be an issue. Some countries want to have tax returns done and notification after someone dies and possibly estate taxes. Like I said unlikely but worth checking out first to be sure.

[firefighter ontheside]

The main tax consideration is that if earn money in Croatia I can be taxed by Croatia and US.  At this point it is not a concern.  I do not plan to move there.  There is a tax treaty in the works between the two countries, but at this point there's no telling if the US will ever sign it.

[doc henderson]

Sretno

[firefighter ontheside]

Sretno

Puno hvala, Doc.

[barbender]

That is really cool! I love family history, because it is like world history under a microscope in a sense.

[firefighter ontheside]

Agreed Barbender.  On my mother's side, my family has been here for much longer.  On my dad's side my Croatian great grandparents came to America in 1903.  My Ukrainian great grandparents came just a few years later.  At the time they were both part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.  Many were unhappy under that rule and knew of the promise of opportunity in America.  Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand of the empire was assassinated in Sarajevo just 10 years later starting WW1.

[hedgerow]

I hope the rest of the journey goes well. My wife has always been our family history buff. In the last three years since she has been retired she has really dove into it. She has got some information from a friend of mine that is a member of the Mormon church. They have a huge library of information. As matter of fact as I am typing this she is getting ready to do a short trip to meet up with some what I call shirt tail family and get some pictures and information from her. 

[SawyerTed]

My dad and his generation have an extensive genealogy collaboration going on.  According to Dad they have his side of the family traced to the Rhine River/Alsace/Bern region to around 1500.   

And barbender is right, the movements and occupations of ancestors really do align with world history.   The happenings in the region and the world certainly impacted my ancestors, especially the religious movements and persecution that occurred that drove people to immigrate to the US in the 1600s.  

[WV Sawmiller]

  I always tell everyone my ancestors, the ones who weren't already here, mostly left the UK/Ireland/Wales and left at night and one step ahead of a posse.

   Good luck on your project.

[barbender]

FFOTS, it sounds like they picked a great time to get out, and their choice is probably why you are here to tell the story.

Many in my family history seemed to kind of operate outside of the main historical events. While many of the first English that came to New England were escaping religious persecution, my Alger ancestors came as a part of a venture to set up a seasonal fish salting operation on the coast of Maine in the early 1620's. Three brothers came over, two ended up staying.

Those two brothers ended up getting killed in an Indian battle that I believe was part of the larger King Philips's war. Very ironically, those tribes were also among my ancestry on my Grandpa's maternal side. History is crazy! 

Kinda like how my family didn't get the world history memo that the Great Depression ended at WWll. They had their own version that extended well into the 60's. Why follow the crowd?😂

[Old Greenhorn]

Congratulations Bill, this is really cool!
 The practical side of me wants to ask what advantages this provides you with?
 It intrigues me enough that I went and checked and I can't do this with Norway. They don't seem to have a hereditary system in place. They allow dual citizenship IF one of parents were a citizen at the time of my birth. My Dad is 2nd generation, so the only option for me is to apply like anyone else and I would have to pass either a social studies or citizenship test in Norwegian (or Sami) and also an oral language test at 'level B2" whatever that is. This is all pretty hard to do when you are not 'in country'.
 So now I am jealous of you. Best of luck with all the paperwork.

[Resonator]

Neat to know your own family history.

As said make sure to check if their are any tax implications, and how it would effect your passport, or any other legal implications. I had a family member who had dual Canadian - American citizenship, and they had to surrender it or they wouldn't receive government benefits.

[barbender]

I have a buddy who is a American/Canadian dual citizen. He can really zip through the border compared to other Americans, the Canucks are kinda like, "Welcome home!"😂

[Old Greenhorn]

In my little bit of reading I saw that if you have two passports (dual citizenship) US law requires that you can only use your American passport when entering or leaving the USA.

 When I flew to Norway in '93 I was amused to see that as we went through customs anyone who just held up the red (Norwegian) Passport was just waved on through with a smile and 'Godt tur' (have a nice trip). The rest of us got the third degree.

[firefighter ontheside]

Tom, having citizenship makes it easier to visit the country and stay as long as we want.  It also comes with European Union citizenship, so we could go anywhere in the union and stay as long as we want.  I would have two passports and use my US one leaving and entering US.  Croatian one for entering Croatia and any other EU country.  It's also sentimental just to say I'm a citizen of the "homeland".

The only tax implication come in if I become a "tax resident" of Croatia which means living there for over 180 days I think.  If I were to earn money in Croatia I would be taxed by US and Croatia which is not great, but I don't expect to do that.

Croatia actually has a declining population.  They are trying to get people to come back and live there.

[SawyerTed]

I hope you are successful in getting it worked out.   I have a friend whose family is Lebanese.  His travels to visit grandparents and other extended family is fascinating.   

We look forward to hearing more about your Croatian family!  

[Raider Bill]

My drinking buddy is,
DRVODJELKA.

[firefighter ontheside]

My drinking buddy is,
DRVODJELKA.

I'm not sure what that is Bill

[Raider Bill]

Woodworker in Croatian.

[firefighter ontheside]

Clearly I need to learn more of the language.  I googled it thinking Google would translate it.  It didn't.  When I put it into my translate app of course then it worked.  

[Resonator]

When he said drinking buddy, I thought he was gonna say Dr. Vodka...

[Raider Bill]

Dr. Tequila IPA

He's Croatian on his Dad's side.

He retired after 54 years doing concrete, now spends his time turning bowls and working with wood.

[firefighter ontheside]

Same here, Croatian on my dad's side.  Dad was half Croatian and half Ukrainian, so of course I'm 1/4 each.  I forget that you guys don't all know my name.  My last name is Modrosic.  When my great grandparents came over it was Modrušić.  They came over in 1903.  By the 1930 census it was changed and lost the diacritics.  It's pronounced Modrushich.  Many names are changed to such spelling to make sure it gets pronounced correctly.

[Old Greenhorn]

The 'name thing' can be a really big deal when you are researching folks who crossed over to the USA from the old country. There were a lot of reasons names got changed. The clerk who recorded the information at the time of emigration may not have understood the persons accent ort language and mis-recorded it. Some would give an altered name to avoid connection to a certain heritage or group, or region. Many immigrants either during or after the transition would alter their names to make them pronounce properly in English or other reasons. When researching, you have to keep this in mind and investigate many spellings.
 My Grandfather, as is Norwegian tradition had the Surname 'Gjertsen" which means the son of Gjert.  But when he traveled out of the area he was 'Gunvald Gjertsen from Lindtveit'. Lindtveit was the farm name. This was how they did it. When he emigrated, his documents read his name as "Gunvald Gjertsen Lindtveit". A couple of my uncles really had trouble with 'Lindtveit", so they Americanized the name to "Lindveit" removing the "T" in the middle. I know that my entire life I have had to carefully get people to spell it right when it mattered and they stumble on that middle "T" every time.
 I told you all that so I could tell you this. In 1993 I visited in oldest living and last 1st cousin(once removed) in Oslo. He was a linguist, book publisher and had owned a bookstore. He also worked with the Norwegian underground during the occupation. Somehow in our hours long meeting I mentioned this name adjustment some of my uncles chose. He threw back his head in obvious disappointment and a little disgust. He said "they can't do that, the name now makes no linguistic sense" and he launched into a mini-lecture on the history of the language, it's development from the old nork and the meaning of the individual parts that make up the name and on and on. All I can say was, sitting there, I was glad to still have that danged "T" in the middle of my name.  I think he might have thrown me out of his study otherwise.

[barbender]

The Iron Range of Minnesota (towns like Hibbing, Virginia, and Mountain Iron) was a real melting pot. There were many Italians, Finns, Serbs, Croats, and others that immigrated and found work in the Iron mines. It's not unusual to see someone of mixed Finnish-Italian ancestry or other groups that didn't tend to mix much elsewhere. 

There are a lot of -ich names up there. FFOTS, that is analogous to "son", correct? 

Maybe I've told this before, I met a guy from Columbia once. The folks he was with were calling him Buković, we thought they were playing around and gave him a nickname to make him sound like a "Ranger". I got visiting with him, through very broken English he explained that his grandfather escaped Europe after WWII and went to Columbia. I asked, "what does Buković mean?" He kind of lit up, and said, "it mean, son of wolf...way better than son of b**** ha ha ha!"

So his name really was Buković🤷😂

[SwampDonkey]

Great detective work. Good to know family history. I have Scottish lineage traceable to William 'The Bruce' Wallace. Although none of the more recent ancestry had any title or aristocracy. A lot of the Scots who where farmers where drove out during the Highland or Lowland clearances when there was a shift in Agricultural practices in Scotland.

[Corley5]

My wife's family on her mother's side could qualify for Lithuania citizenship. They're full on Poles with a Catholic background that ended three or four generations or so back after the family came to Philadelphia where they opened a fruit market. But there's a Lithuania Jewish connection in the Old World and we all know what happened in WWII. This is what would qualify them for Lithuania citizenship. 

[firefighter ontheside]

Yes, the ich or ić means son of.  There is a town near where my family came from called Modruś.  Presumably that's where my family line originated.  There was someone called Modruś.

There is a common misconception that a lot of names were changed at Ellis Island.  It did happen, but not very often.  Ellis Island employed people who spoke the languages to make sure they got the names right.  Of course, they weren't responsible when someone gave the wrong name.  When a fluent and literate Croatian speaker is told a Croatian name, he knows how to spell it.  A lot,of the folks coming over were illiterate.  Names could even be spelled wrong in their native country due to illiteracy.  My name is Modrosic, supposed to be Modrusic.  I am friends with a Modrošić in Croatia.  Her name should be Modrušić, but someone in her past spelled it wrong.

[barbender]

In Finnish, it is -nen. I think it has the sense of "of" or "from" because sometimes it means the son of someone, other times the place they are from. Maki to Makinen for an example.

There are a lot of Finns up here, from the UP of Michigan to North Dakota. My wife has Finnish ancestry. 

Some of the earliest settlers in North America were Finns and Swedes in the Chesapeake Bay area. It's thought that the later English settlers in the area learned log building construction from them, because that was a style of building not really found in England. So you had English building form coupled with
Scandinavian log building techniques, giving birth to something American- the dovetail log cabin so prevalent in the Appalachians. 

More interesting Finnish trivia- many of the Finns that came to the Iron Range had strong communist leanings. In the 1930's, the Soviets had active agents up there and convinced many Finns to come to the Soviet Union, where they could form a Finnish Socialist State in Karelia. I don't know how many went, but it wasn't a small number. 

I can't imagine making the voyage with the whole family from Finland to northern MN, then going all the way back to Russia!

When they got back there, things were in for a bit, but then Stalin's purges began. Since most of the Finns were quite nationalist, most of the men disappeared in the night. 

The former leader of the Communist Party of the US was a Finn from little Makinen, MN which is a township up on the edge of the Iron Range.

[firefighter ontheside]

Interesting @barbender .  Hadn't heard about that before.  I knew they lived in MN of course, but I never heard about them leaving to go to Russia.

I've had a theory about the ending ić that it could also mean from a place and not literally the son of one man.

[barbender]

I first read about those Finns that went back about 15 years ago, I suppose. Seems absolutely crazy now looking back, but back then the working class was pretty dirt poor no matter what economic system you were under or where you were in the world. So it seemed reasonable to them to go back, next door to Finland, and under an idealogy that they thought was the future. 

I found an article about this event, it was way more people than I thought- as many as 10,000!

https://crosssection.gns.wisc.edu/2014/10/12/an-american-in-petrozavodsk-finnish-american-emigration-to-soviet-karelia-by-zachary-strom/

[SwampDonkey]

There was a lot of communism around in the 20 and 30's across Europe and over here. Trudeau's father, Pierre Elliot Trudeau was a communist sympathizer before he was prime minister and during. US economic professor (retired) Richard Wolff will fill you in on that history.

[beenthere]

Recently lost a close friend who was from a Finnish family in northern WI. 

Found this article written about his family and how they came from Finland to Ely, MN. 

https://herbsterwisconsin.com/okkonen-matti-and-maria/

Fit well with "barbender" post. 

[WhitePineJunky]

I have a buddy who is an American/Canadian dual citizen. He can really zip through the border compared to other Americans, the Canucks are kinda like, "Welcome home!"😂

Not too long ago the only thing you needed was a drivers license to cross the border. IMO CDN/USA dual citizenship is the best combo Citizenship to have worldwide.

This from today https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/13/canada-fingerprint-visit-us

[WhitePineJunky]

There was a lot of communism around in the 20 and 30's across Europe and over here. Trudeau's father, Pierre Elliot Trudeau was a communist sympathizer before he was prime minister and during. US economic professor (retired) Richard Wolff will fill you in on that history.

Macleans has a decent article on PT here

https://macleans.ca/economy/the-trudeau-familys-love-of-tyrants/

[SwampDonkey]

The National Post has an article this month, even a podcast about P. E. Trudeau.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/pierre-trudeau-really-really-loved-communists-canada-did-what-podcast

[barbender]

BT, my wife is descended from a community of Finns that settled from the UP to MN. I think they all came from the northern part of Finland, and were part of a Lutheran Church movement called "Laestadian" by outsiders, after the Lutheran pastor that founded the movement. 

Lars Levi Laestadius was a half Saami Swede who worked among the Saami, in the area where Sweden, Norway, and Finland border each other. A religious revival took place that swept that area. The movement splintered and there are a wide variety of churches that descended from it. 

I don't think I've ever heard anyone in the church my wife grew up in call it "Laestadian" though, or if anyone knows that's where it originated. It is called the Independent Apastolic Lutheran Church. It's a very old school, simple church service but with rare but not unheard of outbursts of what seem to be American Pentecostalism. It's rather striking, if you picture a somber, old Lutheran service with a Pentecostal show of emotion in the middle out of no where😊 It doesn't have anything to do with Pentecostalism and has its roots at the beginning of the movement 

Anyways, these Finnish communities are still very centered around there Church, and the services seem as much family reunions as anything else. The unique way they worship, and keep to themselves a bit has had the affect of kind of insulating them from just blending in to the culture. 

[firefighter ontheside]

I received the birth record of my great grandmother from Croatia last week.  I got great grandfathers several weeks ago.  I also received their marriage record.  Basically have everything we need for the application appointment.  My distant cousin has translated most documents in Zagreb, the capital city.  Once she's done with the last one, she will send them to me by DHL.  We will go the appointment with them and submit them.  Then they will be shipped back to Zagreb for the Ministry of Internal Affairs who will make the decision.  That will likely take at least 18 months.