Tracing Your Family's Roots May Soon Get A Lot More Expensive
"Dec. 30 is the deadline to submit a comment to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services over a proposed fee hike to access some records, some of which date back more than 100 years and are useful to genealogists."
"The USCIS wants to increase the fee for obtaining immigration files by 500%, which means some people would have to pay more than $600 for the documents. The move would affect families of the millions of people who immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s."
"'This is immigration history,' Renée Carl, a genealogist in Washington, D.C., who works with clients who use the records, tells NPR's David Greene."
"'If someone is coming from a displaced persons camp in Europe, they would have filled out all this paperwork while still in Europe,' Carl says. 'Then you get the information on when they come in. You get a photograph if there's a visa file. You almost always get a photograph.'"
There are millions of records held at the agency, Carl says. These include alien registration files, files for certificates of naturalization and visa files, if one applied for a visa to come to the United States. "There might be something called a registry file if, during the process of naturalization, the government couldn't find you on a ship manifest, so they were trying to document how you entered the country in the first place," Carl says.