Can You Get Dual Citizenship If a Grandparent Was Born Abroad?

You can pursue dual citizenship through grandparents if your grandparent came from a country whose laws extend citizenship down to the grandchild generation, and if nothing in the family history between their time and yours broke the chain. Ireland, Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Lithuania are the routes people use most often, and each sets its own rules on documentation, generational reach, and what counts as a valid claim.

Countries That Actually Extend Citizenship to Grandchildren

Not every country with ancestry-based citizenship reaches as far as the grandchild generation. Some stop at children born abroad to a citizen parent. The programs below are the ones most commonly used, and each has fine print that decides most applications before they’re even filed.

Ireland

If one of your grandparents was born in Ireland, you can become an Irish citizen by registering on the Foreign Births Register, which is run by Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs.¹ You do not need to prove your parent was an Irish citizen first, but you do need your parent’s birth certificate and your grandparent’s Irish birth certificate to establish the line.

The fee is €278 for adults and €153 for applicants under 18, and processing currently runs about 12 months in strict date order.² Once registered, you’re a full Irish citizen and can apply for a passport. If your connection is through a great-grandparent instead, Ireland generally requires that your parent had registered on the Foreign Births Register before you were born for the claim to extend down.

Italy

Italy long allowed citizenship claims with no generational limit, provided the chain stayed intact. That changed in March 2025. Under Decree-Law 36/2025, people born abroad who hold another citizenship are no longer automatically recognized as Italian unless one of three conditions is met: the Italian citizen parent was born in Italy, that parent lived in Italy for at least two consecutive years before the applicant’s birth, or the applicant’s grandparent was an Italian citizen born in Italy.³ For a grandparent claim, that third condition still works, but only if the grandparent was actually born on Italian soil.

Two additional issues catch Italian applicants more than any others. If your Italian ancestor naturalized in another country before August 16, 1992, they lost Italian citizenship under the old law, and any minor children lost it with them.³ If your grandparent became an American citizen while your parent was still a minor, the chain has likely been broken. Second, if the line passes through a woman who had a child before January 1, 1948, Italian law at the time did not recognize maternal transmission of citizenship. These “1948 cases” have to be filed as lawsuits in a Rome civil court rather than through a consulate.

Poland

Poland places no generational limit on citizenship by descent. If your grandparent (or a more distant ancestor) held Polish citizenship at or after the establishment of the Second Polish Republic in 1919, you can apply to have your Polish citizenship confirmed through a provincial governor via a Polish consulate.⁴ Poland treats this as recognizing citizenship you already hold by operation of law rather than granting anything new. The fee through a U.S. consulate is $118. You’ll need documents proving your grandparent’s Polish citizenship and vital records tracing the line down to you.

Hungary

Hungary introduced a simplified naturalization process in 2010 for people of Hungarian descent, and it has since approved over a million applications. The law has no specified generational limit and covers parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and beyond.⁵ The requirement that eliminates most casual applicants is language: you must demonstrate intermediate-level Hungarian in a conversational assessment when you file. Broken Hungarian or a regional dialect is accepted, but you have to understand and answer questions in the language. For an American whose Hungarian grandparent’s language wasn’t passed down, that means serious study before applying.

Lithuania

Lithuania offers citizenship reinstatement for people whose ancestors held Lithuanian citizenship before June 15, 1940, the date of the Soviet occupation, and for their descendants. It also recognizes people of Lithuanian descent, defined as someone whose parents or grandparents are or were Lithuanian.⁶ Proof typically means pre-1940 Lithuanian passports, military records, or birth certificates that reference citizenship.

Others

Portugal currently allows naturalization for people with a grandparent who was a Portuguese national. Germany’s main route for descendants beyond the child generation is a restitution provision for people whose ancestors lost citizenship because of Nazi persecution between 1933 and 1945.⁷ Bulgaria, Latvia, and Slovakia also run ancestry-based programs with their own requirements.

Where People Assume It Works but It Doesn’t

The United Kingdom is the most common surprise. The UK offers an Ancestry Visa to Commonwealth citizens who can prove a grandparent was born in the UK, but this is a work visa, not citizenship.⁸ It gives you five years of the right to live and work in the UK, after which you might qualify for settlement and eventually naturalize. The grandparent connection alone does not make you British.

A separate problem is that some countries flatly prohibit dual citizenship. China, Japan, India, Singapore, and roughly two dozen others require you to choose one nationality. If the country where your grandparent was born is one of them, acquiring their citizenship would mean giving up your current one. A few countries that historically banned dual citizenship have relaxed those rules recently, so check the current law before deciding.

On the American side, this is not a concern. U.S. law does not require you to choose between American citizenship and another nationality, and naturalizing in another country does not put your U.S. citizenship at risk.⁹

The Broken Chain Problem

The most common reason a grandparent claim fails isn’t that the country refuses to recognize grandchildren. It’s that something between your grandparent’s generation and yours ended the citizenship before it could reach you.

Naturalization abroad is the usual culprit. Many countries historically treated becoming a citizen elsewhere as an automatic renunciation of the original citizenship. Italy stripped citizenship from anyone who naturalized in another country before 1992, along with their minor children. Poland had comparable provisions during certain periods. If your grandfather became an American citizen in 1935 and your father was born in 1940, you need to know whether that naturalization ended the line before your father was born, and whether your father was a minor at the time.

Other chain-breakers include formal renunciation, failure to register a birth abroad within a required window, and gender-based rules that prevented women from passing citizenship to their children during certain periods. Some countries applied different rules depending on whether the transmitting parent was the mother or the father. Many have since reformed those laws or opened court-based remedies like the Italian 1948 cases.

Dates are what decide most of these questions. Whether your parent was a minor or an adult on the date of your grandparent’s naturalization can end a case. Whether your parent was born before or after a specific legal reform can be the difference between a straightforward filing and a lawsuit. This is where people most often benefit from consulting the target country’s consulate or an attorney who specializes in that country’s citizenship law.

The Documents You’ll Need

These applications are paper-proving exercises. You have to build a documentary line from your grandparent to you with no gaps.

Birth certificates for you, your parent, and your grandparent, each showing parentage.
Marriage certificates for each generation, to connect name changes and confirm relationships.
Death certificates for any deceased ancestors in the line.
Proof of your grandparent’s citizenship: old passports, national identity cards, military records, naturalization papers, or civil registry entries.
Naturalization records for any ancestor who became a citizen of another country, to establish exactly when it happened and whether minor children were affected.

Every document typically has to be an original or certified copy. Anything not in the language of the country you’re applying to needs a certified translation. Most countries also require an apostille, a standardized authentication used under the Hague Convention, which has over 125 participating countries.¹⁰ In the U.S., apostilles are issued by the Secretary of State in the state where the document originated.¹¹

Older records are the hardest part. For grandparents who emigrated to the United States, the National Archives holds passenger arrival records for ships and airplanes at U.S. ports between roughly 1820 and 1982, and records older than 75 years are publicly available.¹² For records held in the ancestor’s home country, the consulate can usually point you to the correct civil registry or archive. Church baptismal and marriage registers often fill gaps where government records were lost to war or political upheaval, and several countries accept them as supporting evidence. Budget months for this phase, especially if you need records from more than one country.

What Applying Looks Like

Applications are usually filed at the target country’s consulate or embassy where you live, though some countries take filings directly at a government ministry. Ireland’s Foreign Births Register operates online. Italian consular appointments are known for long backlogs, sometimes over a year just to get a slot.

Filing fees are modest compared to what you’ll spend on documents. Ireland charges €278 for adults.² Poland charges $118 through a U.S. consulate.⁴ Certified copies, translations, and apostilles are where the real spending happens, and several hundred dollars in document preparation is normal even for a clean case. If you need a lawyer, and Italian 1948 cases and complicated Polish confirmations often do, legal fees can run into the thousands.

Processing runs from several months to well over a year. Ireland quotes 12 months. Italian consulates in the U.S. are known for multi-year timelines. Requests for additional documentation partway through can restart parts of the wait.

What Comes With Your Second Passport

Dual citizenship makes you a full citizen of both countries, with rights and obligations in each.⁹ On the rights side, you can live, work, and study in your second country without a visa. Citizenship through Ireland, Italy, Poland, Hungary, or Lithuania also gives you the right to live and work anywhere in the European Union.

The obligations matter too. Some countries have mandatory military service that applies to citizens raised abroad. Tax obligations in the second country may apply once you establish residency there. Entering your second country of citizenship on that country’s passport rather than your American one may be required, and U.S. consular protection can be limited when you’re in a country that considers you its own citizen.¹³

U.S. Tax Reporting You Shouldn’t Ignore

The U.S. taxes its citizens on worldwide income regardless of where they live.¹⁴ Simply holding a second passport doesn’t add tax liability, but using it to bank or work abroad triggers reporting rules that catch a lot of new dual citizens off guard.

If you open bank accounts in your new country and the combined value of your foreign financial accounts crosses $10,000 at any point in the year, you must file a Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR) with FinCEN.¹⁵ Penalties reach $10,000 per violation for non-willful failures and substantially more for willful ones.

Separately, the IRS requires U.S. taxpayers with specified foreign financial assets above certain thresholds to file Form 8938 with their return. For unmarried taxpayers living in the U.S., the trigger is $50,000 in foreign assets at year-end or $75,000 at any point in the year, with higher thresholds for joint filers and for taxpayers living abroad.¹⁶ Tax treaties, the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion, and the Foreign Tax Credit often mean you won’t actually owe more in tax, but the filing obligations apply regardless of what you owe, and skipping them is where people get into serious trouble.

1
Citizens Information. The Foreign Births Register
2
Ireland.ie. Registering a Foreign Birth
3
Consolato Generale d’Italia a Los Angeles. Citizenship by Descent
4
Republic of Poland. Confirming Polish Citizenship or Its Loss
5
Embassy of Hungary. Simplified Naturalization (Citizenship)
6
Lithuanian Migration Department. Reinstate Lithuanian Citizenship
7
Gesetze im Internet. Nationality Act
8
GOV.UK. UK Ancestry Visa: Overview
9
Travel.State.Gov. Dual Nationality
10
HCCH. Apostille Section
11
USAGov. Authenticate an Official Document for Use Outside the U.S.
12
National Archives. Passenger Arrival Records
13
USAGov. How to Get Dual Citizenship or Nationality
14
IRS. Frequently Asked Questions About International Individual Tax Matters
15
FinCEN. Report Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts
16
IRS. Do I Need to File Form 8938, Statement of Specified Foreign Financial Assets