Chris Seferyn’s great-grandparents didn’t talk about the “old country”.
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Although they were from the same part of eastern Slovakia, Chris Seferyn’s great-grandparents on his mother’s side had to travel half the world to the US in order to actually meet and get married. Curiously, as he was tracking down his family roots, he learned that even though they had tied the knot, the marriage was never legal.
“They didn’t understand how things worked at the time,” he explains, adding that everything was done then by the health department, which handled certificates. They went to the office together and signed the paperwork, of which there is a record. They then went to their church and got married. Then they were supposed to bring a piece of paper from the church signed by the priest back to make it official.
“Well, they never brought the paper back. When I had to get some documents and certificates for the citizenship process, I couldn’t get their marriage certificate because there wasn’t one,” he says.
