Cat. Bag. Out.

 

I don't think I'm being premature, letting this particular cat out of the bag. Excited. Scared. Overwhelmed. Curious. Daunted by paperwork, language, logistics.

I’ve been sitting on this news for sometime, afraid to let it out for fear of jinxing it. But now we’re far enough along in the process that I can actually believe it’s going to happen.

Our beloved El Galeon (promotional photo)

During our last three spectacular summers on El Galeon in Europe, I’ve been meticulous about not overstaying the 90-day time limit for our Schengen Visa or our 180-day limit in the UK. It’s been okay but somewhat limiting.  

So we’ve been looking at various long-stay visas. Spain and Portugal seemed good candidates and we have friends in both countries, but the type of visas we could get (NLV or D7, “retirement” visas) were too restrictive for our plans. We considered just being true digital nomads, 90-days in the EU and 90 days out, nicknamed the “Schengen shuffle.” We looked at spending half the year in Canada and half in the UK, what we privately dubbed the “English-speaking shuffle,” but those shuffles get expensive over time. And none of these options would really help us be able to spend more time on the Galeon.

"Grandpa Jack" and his wife Bertha at Atlantic City in 1919, before the kids. My dad was the youngest of 3.

 Enter … Romania. (Drum roll) 

Neither of us has ever been particularly interested in genealogy, being more interested in where people are going to than where they are coming from. And yet, a chance finding on my (Jaye's) father's birth certificate while we were downsizing our storage unit led to the discovery that, as the granddaughter of a Romanian emigrant, Jaye is eligible for Romanian citizenship by descent. However, knowing it is different than legally proving it. 

The first hurdle was that although “Grandpa Jack’s” (Jacob) nationality was listed as Romanian on my father’s birth certificate, his Romanian name was unlikely to have been Jack. He appeared to have changed his name to an Americanized one when he arrived here, I literally didn't even know his name!

Research! The immigration museum in Bremerhaven.

Remember that immigration museum we visited while the ship was in Germany for a festival in 2025? They had a research room upstairs that you could use as part of the tour. It was there that we learned that the Romanian equivalent of “Jacob” was probably Iancu. (More often translated as John, but grandad, then a kid immigrating through Ellis Island, may have decided Jacob was the American-sounding name that was closest to his own.) We found the ship’s manifest for the voyage that brought the family from LeHavre, France, to the US. We combed my father’s papers and got some help from a cousin in California. 

We pieced together a little of my grandfather’s life. He was the youngest of a family of 7, possibly an “oops” baby, his father was a shoemaker and his mother a homemaker. One by one they sent the older brothers to the US to build better lives and finally the parents with the two youngest children made the passage arriving in January 1903. And indeed they did make better lives; my grandfather listed his occupation as “law clerk” when he signed the papers intending to declare his US citizenship one day after his 18th birthday; and by the time my father was born Jack’s occupation is listed as lawyer.  I now even know things like where he first lived when he arrived in the US and the name of the ship he arrived on, the date he applied for his marriage license to my grandmother, when he registered for the draft, and other "vital statistics" even his height. 

But the info I needed to obtain was the exact opposite of what I really wanted to know about him. I don't know any of the important things: was he kind? Generous? Smart? Funny? I can infer a few things: he filed his declaration of intent to naturalize the day he was eligible, the day after his 18th birthday, so I'm guessing his enthusiasm for, and commitment to, his new country. For the son of shoemaker to have been listed as able to read and write when he first arrived in the US, and to become a lawyer, indicates intellegence and hard work. He died when I was just a baby so I have no recollection of him, but he left me our shared initials JBL, a gold bracelet, and, apparently, a right to Romanian citizenship. And hence, ultimately EU citizenship and freedom of movement and fewer restrictions on our El Galeon adventures. 

At the Palace of the Parliament building in Bucharest

We hired a law firm in Romania to help with the process, and really lucked out. They were knowledgeable, responsive, and not overly expensive. Their first task was to find Jack’s birth certificate.

 It took months. I had privately given up at the 3-month mark. Then doomscrolling at 3 am one May morning I saw an email from the law firm in Bucharest (where it was 10 am). “Dan, wake up, RIGHT NOW!” I shook his shoulder. “They found him! They found Grandpa Jack!” 

I naively thought that was the end of the hard part, but there was a lot of documentation needed. And mine was considered a straightforward case—paternal line, so no change of names, no divorces, grandfather to father to me. Birth certificates and marriage licenses to prove the chain of descent, simple, right? Nope. I have files. A box of files. A four-page list of required documents. I have an excel spreadsheet to keep track of them. Hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in fees and notaries and postage and copies. And we’re not done yet. 

So our post-Galeon trip to Romania in September wasn’t just a random vacation. A couple of days after arriving we met with our lawyer and it went wonderfully. Every single question we asked, the answer was even better than we expected and brought us smiles. The meeting ended with a hug instead of a handshake. The first two words of Romanian I learned were “thank you” and “amazing.” 

We loved Romania! I hadn’t expected that. The Carpathian Mountains reminded us of our home in Colorado. Sibiu was historic and walkable and quirky. Bucharest was optimistic and energetic and not overly touristy. The country is coming out of 40 years of corrupt communist rule so there’s a lot of catching up to do. There are going to be challenges. The cuisine is meat-centric and the values are rather conservative and religious, so it’s not the best fit for us on paper, but there are bookstores, cobblestone streets, and dramatic buildings. And the people are straightforward and respectful and warm and helpful. When they smile they really mean it. We’re gonna be okay here.

I have an entire file box dedicated to this project! 

There’s still a long road. You’d think that after 34 years of working for the federal government (6 years Army and 28 Interior) I’d be immune to the frustration of bureaucracy and paperwork but it’s the opposite—I’ve become hypersensitized to it. Nothing good comes for free, sigh. Anyway that’s our big news. We’re not giving up Cinderella, our amazing Annapolis apartment, or our US citizenship, so consider this new opportunity an addition to our lives, not an “instead of” replacement. We’ll keep you posted!