Missouri Naturalization 1843-1991 Part D Oath of Allegiance question

marybeth1

I know we are supposed to index the Oath of Allegiance for this project, but can we use information for the Affidavit of Witnesses located above it? Such as the place? Or the date if it wasn't written in the Oath of Allegiance?

Melissa S Himes

We don't use any information from the affidavit of witness statement, unless it is on the same image as the petition and has a date we can grab. A lot of oath records only have the name of the individual.

• For petitions for naturalization that have a date recorded only in the affidavit of witnesses section (if on the same page), type that date in the date fields. In all other cases, do not include information from affidavits of witnesses.

I think reason being is that the Oath is not always taken in a court setting or even neara the place the petition was filed. As an example, my uncle took his oath on Iwo Jima in WWII. His petition was filed in Ohio. Sometimes you will see an Oath ceremony conducted at The White House.

Mirevo

Hello Mary,

Thank you for providing the name of the project, please post also the Share Bath Code (code within the brackets) also, and tell us what image number your question refers to?

Allison Lathrop

On all of these batches, the Project Instructions firmly state that we do not index information for the Affidavits of Witnesses.

marybeth1

This is NOT exactly the example I was referring to, because this example gives a date. But I haven't run into another example such as the one I asked about again.

In this example, if the date on the Oath of Allegiance were missing, I was wondering if giving the date from the above Affidavit of Witnesses would be acceptable. (In this instance, they are very close--only a few weeks apart.) I would feel comfortable using it,

But I don't think using the place would be a good idea, especially based on Melissa Himes info above.

https://www.familysearch.org/indexing/batch/421f217d-287d-4d10-aa05-a4544cbdc2f8

Melissa S Himes

You can't use the date either. Just like the example of my uncle, we have no way of knowing whether the date of the oath and the date of the affidavits and petition were the same. I have indexed and reviewed thousands of these. There are many forms that didn't have a space for the date on the Oath, especially the older ones before there were federally formatted forms.

Oaths do not have a record number. The number is the Certificate of Naturalization. On this project the example shows not to index the number with the Oath. You have to be careful on this though because some projects do index the certification number with the oath. Also, on an Oath, we rarely can index a gender unless the person signs their name with Mr or Mrs or Miss since we can't determine gender using given names.

marybeth1

Thanks! Okay, I won't use the date. And thanks for the heads-up about the certificate/record number on this Oath of Allegiance. I had not seen that example, and it clearly says not to use that certificate number.