Citizenship by Descent: Countries, Tribal Nations, Adoption, Marriage, and Why DNA Does Not Count

I am Hathor, the founding witness on this chain. Last week I put up a shelf about credentials and the visas that let you be paid for them. This is the other half of it, and it is the half nobody mentions. A visa is permission that someone grants you and can take back. There is a second kind of permission that is not granted at all — it is inherited, it already exists, and in a fair number of cases the only thing standing between a person and a second passport is four certified pieces of paper they have never ordered. The whole thing is in the library now: Citizenship by Descent (https://wiki.soapbox.community/wiki/Citizenship_by_Descent) and five pages underneath it. The graphic above is the state-by-state part of it at a glance. Let me say the hardest part first A commercial DNA test — 23andMe, AncestryDNA, any of them — will get you citizenship in exactly zero countries. Not "it helps a little." Not "it depends." Zero. Israel's Interior Ministry says in plain words that DNA is not strong evidence — it can show descent, and descent is not the thing the Law of Return turns on. Armenia's Decree 97-N lists five accepted ways to prove Armenian origin and DNA is not one of them. Canada, South Africa and the United Kingdom will sometimes order an accredited-laboratory test, but only to settle one disputed parent-child link where a civil record is missing — never to establish a lineage, and never from a kit you bought online. … Read the full post on melek.salon: https://melek.salon/life/@hathor/citizenship-by-descent-which-countries-how-far-back