On 23rd of June, 2016, me and my family’s jaws were ajar with disbelief that our country had voted to leave the European Union – ironically, so was David Cameron’s, no doubt. While the ex-PM can simply pop off to his 2-million-pound Cornish mansion for a pleasant vacation from London (as well as his failed leadership), summering for the general public will not be so blissfully easy now that Britain stands alone.
Due to my mother’s career as a travel writer, me and my family go abroad regularly – often around Europe. Of course, Brexit is likely to mean extra visas and extra money every time we venture into a European country, and being a family which prides itself on having good value for money standards (otherwise known as being cheap), this simply would not do! Desperate to find a way to alleviate the costs and difficulty of post-Brexit travel, my parents started rummaging through the branches of their family trees in the hope of finding a family member with European ties. At first, this seemed like an easy task for my father, my siblings and me: my dad’s grandmother is from the Republic of Ireland. We assumed this route would be a shoo-in, so much so that I had begun to perfect my Irish accent. A few weeks later, my dad filed for Irish citizenship and a passport.
However, my siblings and I were prohibited from receiving the same paperwork due to a law which states that our dad would have had to obtain his Irish citizenship before our births. We had hit a dead end.
So, my mum dug a little deeper into her heritage. Her first thought was to pursue her Polish roots, but she didn’t qualify for citizenship. There was a certain ambiguity about her next potential path to European passports. Her Grandfather, Elias, fled to London from somewhere in what was the Soviet Union as a result of Jewish persecution. The question was: where in the Soviet Union? It turns out, he was born in Siauliai, a small town in Lithuania, meaning that this route was a legitimate track in my Mum’s hunt for European citizenship. But this was only the beginning of her journey.
My mum’s next few weeks consisted of chronic backache from all the awkward crouching she had to do whilst scouring her father’s attic for Elias’ birth certificate and an artillery of other documents proving his Lithuanian heritage. Armed with a hefty arsenal of century-old paperwork, she headed down to the Lithuanian embassy in Belgravia, central London, only to find that all her documents were written in Russian due to the fact that when Elias was born, Lithuania was under Russian control. My mum was told that she would have to prove that Elias had lived in Lithuania after it had been liberated in 1918 in order to legitimise his Lithuanian roots. The issue was, she was in no possession of any of his documentation post 1916.
So it was suggested to her that she should try the Lithuanian archives in Siauliai in the tenuous hope that someone might be able to track down his passport. The unconvinced, snide tone of the woman on the phone who worked at the archives made it seem like this task was a parallel to finding a needle in a haystack; however, two needles emerged. The woman had managed to locate both Elias’ and his father (my great-great grandfather) Aaron’s passport, both dated 1922 and therefore proved that he lived in Lithuania after its independence.
My great-great grandfather Aaron’s passport
Fast forward a few months: my mum, and my siblings, and I are all officially Lithuanian citizens and are waiting on our passports, which are due to be ready in a matter of weeks. I feel like a new person – quite literally: the Lithuanian alphabet does not contain the letter “W”, so my new legal name in Lithuania is Hannah de Leuv.
Cue sultry jazz music.
Written by Hannah De Leuw, 11WG
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