You may already be a Romanian citizen, entitled to a passport, without knowing it

Under Romanian law a child is a Romanian citizen if at least one parent held Romanian citizenship at the moment of that child’s birth, wherever in the world the birth took place. If that was true in every generation of a family, the descendant living today is already a Romanian citizen. In that case the procedure is the confirmation of an existing status rather than an application, and no Romanian language certificate is required. If the chain broke somewhere — most often on the day an ancestor naturalised abroad — the routes are Articles 10 and 11 of Legea 21/1991, which reach grandchildren and great-grandchildren respectively.

Which of these describes your family is a matter of dates and documents. It is worth working out before you begin, because the two procedures are different and choosing the right one at the start can save a year or more.

Many people assume that Romanian citizenship is always something to be obtained: you find a lawyer, learn the language, file an application and wait several years. For many families that is the right path. For some, however, it is not the question at all, because the law already made them Romanian citizens at birth and the only thing missing is the paperwork that records it.

Two different questions, and why the order matters

It helps to separate two questions that are easily confused.

Am I already a Romanian citizen? This is a question of fact. Either the law made you a citizen at birth or it did not. No official decides the answer; the authorities only record it once the documents show it.

Can I be granted Romanian citizenship? This is a question of application. An authority examines your file and reaches a decision.

Most guides in English deal only with the second question. Answering the first one before you start tells you which procedure you are actually in, and therefore which documents you need.

How is citizenship inherited under Romanian law?

Romanian citizenship passes by descent (by blood) rather than by place of birth. Under Legea 21/1991, a child is a Romanian citizen if at least one parent was a Romanian citizen at the time of that child’s birth, regardless of where the birth took place. In other words, what matters is not whether a person was born in Romania but whether they were born to a Romanian citizen.

To see what this means in practice, imagine a child born in Brooklyn in 1948 to a father who was still a Romanian citizen. At the moment of birth, that child was a Romanian citizen too. If the child later had a daughter while still holding that status, the daughter was also born Romanian. None of this has to be claimed in order to be true, and the status does not expire because nobody used it.

This is why confirmation exists as a procedure. Citizenship can pass down three generations while the family speaks only English and has never held a Romanian document.

Where does the chain usually break?

In many families the chain does break at some point, and the reason is often different from the one people expect.

Emigration by itself does not break it. Leaving Romania, or leaving territory that had been part of Romania, did not take away anyone’s citizenship. Many families assume that it did and therefore never look into the question.

A legal act does break it. This means either that the person renounced Romanian citizenship or that the state withdrew it. Under Legea 24/1971, which was in force until 1991, the Council of State could withdraw citizenship from people who had left the country clandestinely, among other grounds, and it could also approve a renunciation requested by the person themselves. These are two different events, and they have different consequences today. Which of them happened is recorded in an official file, so it is established from the archives rather than from family memory.

Naturalising abroad also broke it. Under Legea 724/1924, Romanian nationality was lost prin naturalizare dobândită în țară streină — by naturalisation acquired in a foreign country. The loss was not a suspension: citizenship ended on the day the naturalisation took effect.

For families in the United States this is usually the decisive fact, because it turns the whole question into a comparison of dates.

Why the answer depends on dates

Suppose your great-grandfather naturalised as an American in 1931. From that day he was no longer a Romanian citizen, so any child born to him afterwards was not born Romanian, and the chain ends with that child.

A child born to him in 1928, however, while he still held Romanian nationality, was born Romanian. Whether that status then passed to the next generation depends on what that child did in their own adult life, not on what their father did later.

This means the first thing to establish is something you can often sketch at home: the date the ancestor naturalised, and the dates of the births that followed. United States naturalisation records are public and searchable. If you set the two sets of dates side by side, it is often clear straight away whether confirmation is worth looking into.

What this sketch cannot show is what happened on the Romanian side, such as a renunciation or a withdrawal of citizenship. That information is held in archives.

Each birth is judged by the law of its own time

Today’s rules cannot simply be applied backwards through a family tree. Each birth in the line is assessed under the law that was in force on the day it happened:

• Legea 724/1924, whose Article 56 confirmed that the inhabitants of the provinces united with Romania are and remain Romanian citizens, without being required to complete any formality — Bukovina, Transylvania, Banat, Crișana, Sătmar and Maramureș for those holding indigenat (the local right of residence and belonging) as of 18 November / 1 December 1918, and Bessarabia for those with administrative domicile as of 27 March / 9 April 1918, unless they had opted for another nationality. Article 36 of the same law sets out the loss of nationality by foreign naturalisation;
• Legea 86/1939, which replaced it;
• Legea 24/1971, the communist-era law;
• Legea 21/1991, in force today.

For example, a great-grandfather born in Bălți in 1930 and one born in Bălți in 1910 are not in the same legal position, and neither is automatically better placed. The answer depends on what the law said at each date and on what the records show.

What does confirmation involve?

Where the chain holds, there is a defined procedure, and it is separate from a citizenship application.

Romanian consulates handle a process for verifying a person’s legal status in relation to the Romanian state. It is designed for people who are Romanian citizens but hold no Romanian document proving it, which is exactly the position of a third-generation descendant. The outcome is an atestat de cetățenie română, an attestation of Romanian citizenship.

After that, the steps are administrative rather than discretionary, meaning that no authority weighs whether to approve them. Your foreign civil status records, such as your birth certificate and your parents’, are transcribed (entered) into the Romanian civil registry. A Romanian birth certificate is then issued, and identity documents and a passport follow from it.

Two consequences matter to most readers.

There is no B1 language requirement on this route. The Romanian language certificate applies to applications under Articles 10 and 11, where citizenship is granted or restored. On this route nothing is being granted.

There is no discretionary decision. Romanian law states clearly that no foreign citizen has a right to be granted citizenship on application. That provision concerns the granting of citizenship. It does not apply to a person who is already a citizen, because the authorities are recording an existing status rather than deciding whether to grant one.

What if the chain did break?

In that case confirmation is not your route, and this is an ordinary outcome: most family lines broke somewhere in the last hundred years. The law then offers two other routes, described in detail in Article 10 or Article 11: which one is yours.

Where citizenship was lost voluntarily, Article 10 of Legea 21/1991 reaches descendants to the second degree, that is, grandchildren. Where it was lost through no fault of the person, or taken away against their will, Article 11 reaches the third degree, that is, great-grandchildren. For families from Bessarabia and Bukovina, whose citizenship changed because the border moved rather than because anyone chose to give it up, Article 11 is usually the relevant one.

Which of the two applies is therefore not decided by counting generations. It is decided by why citizenship was lost, and the answer to that is held in archives in Chișinău, Chernivtsi, Iași or Bucharest.

Where to start

The best starting point is not a language course or an application form but what your family already knows and has. That means names as they were actually spelled, places as they were called at the time, approximate dates, and any documents that have survived; a photograph of a page is enough to begin with. From this it is possible to say which of the three positions applies to you and which documents are still missing.

This first step is document work, and most of the documents are held in registries and archives in Ukraine, Moldova and Romania. Requesting them requires the right language, the correct name for each document, and the legal standing to ask for it. We explain how this is done in a separate article on recovering ancestral records and, country by country, in a guide to family birth certificates. It is also the part of the case we handle ourselves.