Italy · Citizenship by descent
The tailor from Milan
A thimble, a workbook from a Milanese tailoring house, and three generations across two oceans — how a Belgian family recovered the Italian citizenship that had been theirs all along.
Family stories
The families we’ve had the privilege to know.
Families ask, reasonably, what this work is actually like. The accounts below are our answer. Because discretion is the condition of everything we do, no real names appear here: people are reduced to initials, places are kept general, and details have been altered or blended across engagements so that no family can be recognized — including by its own relatives. Read them as anonymized, composite portraits of the work, true to its character rather than to any single file.
Paraguay · Nationality by descent
Return to Asunción
A grandfather who crossed into Brazil for work and never moved back, a daughter who made the return he kept postponing, and a constitutional promise that is kept the old way: in person, before a judge in Paraguay.
Ireland · Foreign Births Register
A letter from 1947
A bundle of letters posted from County Cork after the war, a townland name misheard for seventy years, and the register entry that brought a scattered family back within reach of Ireland.
Spain · Sephardic heritage
The photograph in the attic
A studio portrait with an inscription in two alphabets, community registers kept across five centuries, and a family that learned its own name had been waiting for it in Spain.
Argentina · Recognition & reunification
My father, whom I never met
A birth certificate with an empty line, a name spoken once, and the careful legal and human work of establishing a relationship that existed for fifty years without paperwork.
Uruguay & Italy · Documentation
Twelve documents, one family
Four countries, two parallel citizenship claims, one spreadsheet kept like a ship’s log — the unglamorous logistics behind a family file that finally held.