The child was under 18: how Art. 13 of the 1920 act breaks the chain

Three dates, not two

Most families arrive with two dates: the year the ancestor naturalised and the year the next person in the line was born. They compare the two, see that the child was born first, and conclude that citizenship passed down. A Polish voivode counts differently, and his arithmetic has three dates: when the ancestor acquired foreign citizenship, when he stopped being subject to the Polish military obligation, and how old the child was at that second moment. Two of those three are usually missing from family memory.

The reason lies in how the act of 20 January 1920 was built. Citizenship was lost at the moment foreign citizenship was acquired (Art. 11 ust. 1 pkt 1), and that loss was not personal: it reached the wife and the children as well. So the question people ask themselves, whether the child was born before the naturalisation, decides nothing on its own. What decides is the child's age on the day citizenship actually disappeared. And one more rule, without which the arithmetic never adds up: your ancestor's citizenship is judged under the act in force at the moment of the event, not under today's law. For naturalisations between 1920 and 1951 that means the 1920 act, and no later provision corrects it retroactively.

What does Art. 13 actually say?

The short answer: the loss of citizenship extended to the wife and to children under the age of 18, and that threshold of 18 is what decides a case. The provision is short, and it is worth reading in the original, because every paraphrase sounds gentler than the text.

There are three things in that sentence. First, it is symmetrical: it carries both the grant and the loss, so it works against you exactly as readily as it would have worked for you. Second, the wife stands next to the children, which means your great-grandmother was caught by your great-grandfather's naturalisation as well, and that is a separate branch of the calculation. Third, the reservation about a ministerial decision means a different outcome was possible, but only where the minister expressly provided for it. Loss under Art. 11 ust. 1 pkt 1 happened automatically, with no decision at all, so there was nobody to provide otherwise. If a Polish document with such a reservation does turn up in your ancestor's file, that is a rarity worth a lawyer's separate attention.

The date of loss is not always the date of naturalisation

This is the least obvious part of the whole question. The same Art. 11 carried a reservation in favour of men liable for military service: they could acquire foreign citizenship only after obtaining permission, and failing that «wobec Państwa Polskiego nie przestaną być uważane za obywateli polskich», that is, as far as the Polish State was concerned they did not stop being Polish citizens. The 1932 wording replaced permission from the Minister of Military Affairs with release from the universal military obligation, but the substance of the exception stayed the same.

For years this was read as a rescue: the ancestor was of conscription age, therefore he kept his citizenship, therefore the chain holds. The Supreme Administrative Court closed that reading in case II OSK 1115/21 of 12 June 2024. The case is American, and the facts are exactly the ones described here: the grandfather emigrated to the United States, acquired US citizenship on 13 July 1928, held no release from the military obligation, and did in fact keep his Polish citizenship. Then he lost it in September 1933, with no new event of any kind, simply because he aged out of conscription.

Then comes the arithmetic. The applicant's father was born on 5 April 1925. On the date of loss, in September 1933, he was eight years old, under 18, and by Art. 13 he lost his citizenship together with his father. The applicant himself was born in the United States in 1959, and his birth gave him nothing: the chain had broken one generation earlier, 26 years before he was born. The Supreme Administrative Court dismissed the appeal.

So the naturalisation date alone does not answer the question. First you have to establish the date of loss. It equals the naturalisation date only where the ancestor was not subject to the military obligation at all: a woman, a man older than the upper age limit, or a man who obtained a release. In every other case the loss was deferred, sometimes by years, and it is that deferred date against which the child's age is measured.

One detail in that table deserves separate attention, because in a borderline case it decides everything. The 1924 act ran the obligation to the end of the calendar year in which a man turned 50, while the court in that very case tied the loss to the day of his 50th birthday. A few months make no difference when the child is eight. But if the child was almost 18 on that date, those months become the most important fact in the file, and they are worth discussing separately with a lawyer.

Three situations for the next link

Once the date of loss is known, all that remains is to compare it with the birth date of the next person in the line. There are three possible outcomes.

The third row is often mistaken for the first, because the family story says «he was already born in America». The place of birth decides nothing by itself: what matters is what the father was, in Polish law, on that day. The reverse is also true, and it surprises people more: being born in Poland does not save the chain if the child was still under 18 on the date of loss. One more thing: the provision looks at each child separately. In a large family the eldest, already 18 on the date of loss, kept citizenship, while a younger sibling of 16 lost it. The chain therefore runs on through the elder line and stops in the younger one, and two descendants of the same family end up with different answers.

What do you do with your own case?

Step one: the exact date of your ancestor's naturalisation. Not the year, the date, because everything is counted from it. Where to obtain it in the US, Canada and the UK, with forms, fees and waiting times, is set out in a separate article on naturalisation archives. A US file after 1906 comes with a bonus: the law required minor children to be listed in the petition and on the certificate itself, so the household on that day is visible in the same document.

Step two: your ancestor's date of birth. Without it you cannot work out when he aged out of conscription, and for a man of conscription age that is the date of loss. This is also where you check for a release from the obligation: under the 1938 act, release on the ground of acquiring foreign citizenship was granted only on application, so either it is in the file or it never existed.

Step three: the birth date of the next link and the same arithmetic between it and the date of loss. That result decides whether there is anything further to discuss.

Step four: deciding whether to file. It helps to know that the burden of proof is not on you. In case II OSK 1393/10 of 2 June 2011 the Supreme Administrative Court held that the authority must at least make the loss of citizenship plausible, and that inferring it from the party's failure to prove the opposite is forbidden: the court called this an inversion of the basic rules of administrative procedure. In other words, «the documents did not survive» is not in itself a ground for refusal.

What remains when the chain is broken

A broken chain closes off confirmation of citizenship, but it does not close off Polish origin. The two are different things: confirmation declares citizenship that has existed since the day of birth, while origin is a fact that carries rights of its own. Two roads therefore stay open: the Karta Polaka and permanent residence based on Polish descent. How those procedures differ from confirmation, and why one cancels the other, is shown in a separate article.

The female line is a case apart. If the key link in your family tree is a woman, the military exception does not apply to her, because the universal military obligation never covered women. Two other provisions apply instead: Art. 10 of the 1920 act stripped citizenship from a Polish woman who married a foreigner, and Art. 13 extended to a wife the loss suffered by her husband. In a female line, therefore, the critical date is the date of the marriage, and without it there is no answer. The same Art. 10 also offered a way back: once the marriage ended and she settled in Poland, she could recover her citizenship by declaration.

You can test your own chain without drawing legal conclusions yourself: our questionnaire asks for dates a person actually knows and applies the provisions on its own. If your case is Eastern rather than Western, a different act and a different article govern it: the act of 1951.

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