A passport is widely understood today to be a prerequisite for international travel. However (with a couple exceptions), the US government has only required its citizens to have passports for overseas travel since June 1941. Still, your ancestors may have obtained a passport before that date.
Even if your family no longer has the passport itself, documents associated with a passport application can provide valuable information about your ancestors both native-born and naturalized. Even better, successful applications up to March 1925 are widely available online. Here’s what you need to know about passport applications and the several, little-known record sets that supplement them.
CLUES IN PASSPORT APPLICATIONS
The details included in application documents have changed over time. Since 1811, applications have contained a physical description of the applicant, their place of residence, and a signature. The document also often listed the applicant’s foreign destination and/or reason for travel, especially as time moved on. And the very presence of a passport application implies citizenship or naturalization status; your immigrant ancestor generally wouldn’t apply for a US passport if he weren’t a US citizen at the time.
As the 19th century
