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Ancestra was founded on a single conviction: that citizenship by descent is not a bureaucratic transaction but a restoration of identity. For over a decade, our editorial team and genealogists have helped families across 124 countries trace their lineage, recover the documents that prove it, and file the cases that return citizenship to those to whom it already belongs by birthright.
Citizenship by descent is the most generous and least understood path to a second passport. Millions of people around the world are already citizens of a country they have never lived in — they simply do not know it yet. The laws that govern this transfer are old, complex, and deeply specific to each country, each era, and each family circumstance. We exist to make those laws navigable, transparent, and actionable for the families they affect.
We believe the right to belong — to a country, to a culture, to a name — should not be lost to time, distance, or the slow erosion of memory. We believe that the children and grandchildren of emigrants deserve the same access to their heritage as those who never left. And we believe that the legal work of restoring that access should be done with care, with precision, and with a deep respect for the families whose lives are changed by it.
Every country page, every eligibility opinion, and every legal claim on this site is reviewed by an attorney or counsel admitted in the relevant jurisdiction. We do not publish user-generated content. We do not paraphrase Reddit threads. We do the work.
Our genealogists have recovered records from archives in 47 countries. We trace emigration corridors, locate naturalization files, reconstruct family trees from civil registries, and apostille what we find. Every claim we make is backed by a document.
We cover 124 countries across seven regions, but we know each country's quirks. Italy's 1948 cases. Ireland's Foreign Births Register. Germany's Article 116 restitution. Poland's 1951 and 1962 laws. Hungary's simplified naturalization. We know the path, and we know the exceptions.
From the first consultation to the oath ceremony, your case is handled with strict confidentiality. Your documents, your family story, and your eligibility assessment are confidential. We do not sell your data. We do not share your case with third parties.
Ancestra began with a single case — a grandmother born in Palermo in 1934 who emigrated to New York in 1958 and never naturalized. Her grandson, born in New York in 1992, did not know he was Italian until a chance conversation at a wedding. The process of reclaiming that citizenship took three years, two trips to Italy, and a stack of apostilled documents 17 pages thick. When it was done, he held two passports, and he held a question: how many other families are sitting on a birthright they do not know about?
The answer, it turned out, was millions. There are an estimated 50 million people of Italian descent living outside Italy. 70 million people claim Irish ancestry. 30 million people of Polish descent live across the Americas. Each of these diasporas — and dozens more — contains families who are eligible for citizenship under the laws of their ancestors' home countries, if only someone could tell them which laws apply, which documents to find, and where to file.
Ancestra is that someone. We built the platform we wished had existed when that first case was filed — a single place to trace a lineage, recover the documents, get a written eligibility opinion, and file the case. We have grown to cover 124 countries, but the mission has not changed: to restore the citizenship that is already yours by birthright.
Start with our free 4-minute eligibility check, or book a private consultation with an Ancestra case lead. The first 90 minutes are confidential and free of charge.