Why?

If you’re in the US, you should know this because if you want to apply for a passport, you’ll be required to provide information about your parents such as birth dates and places. If you’re divorced, you will have to provide the same info along with marriage and divorce date, even if it was decades ago. So if you have access to that info, make sure you record it somewhere safe for Future use.

If you’re not in the US, you should know because this information can be difficult for people to get if they never knew one or both parents, or have a bad/non-relationship with them. Or if they had a contentious divorce or an abusive partner. Which is another reason why just leaving the country can be difficult for people who are already marginalized.

  • Donebrach@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    4 minutes ago

    All this info can probably be obtained through a country clerk / registrar depending on what you need to know.

  • LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world
    8·
    5 hours ago

    I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten a passport in the USA before and never had to provide any of that information. Is this something new?

  • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    6 hours ago

    Struggled a bit because my grandparents raised me and they’re dead. Not sure all that has to be prefect though. Divorce dates for example, how are they gonna check, call all 50 states and request records? If I can’t readily determine where my grandparents were born, how would the federal government know?

    Anyway, this isn’t new, and certainly not a Trump thing because I applied before Biden was out.

  • Maggoty@lemmy.world
    2·
    6 hours ago

    It’s not an automatic denial either though. You can N/A those sections if you don’t have the information. They may ask you to fill out an extra form but if you’re an adult they may also just accept it if everything else is okay. What you shouldn’t do is lie on the form. So don’t N/A something where you do have the information.

    • Okokimup@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      5 hours ago

      I was hoping that would be the case, but everything I googled said “if you cant reach out to your ex-spouse, no problem, just get the info from their friends or family!” Like, thanks, anyone close enough to him to know that info hates my guts and will definitely tell him and give him my contact info.

  • Sausager@lemmy.world
    15·
    12 hours ago

    Also, if you’re old like me (40+), your parents middle initials might not be on your birth certificate and they won’t accept it. You’ll have to go through getting a new birth certificate beforehand and run all around the city waiting in lines for an entire day. Ask me how I know.

    • SnarkoPolo@lemmy.world
      2·
      7 hours ago

      My father was given a middle name at birth, which he changed when he got his Social Security card. I’ve already had a bit of legal difficulty with that one.

  • Apepollo11@lemmy.world
    627·
    1 day ago

    From an outsider’s perspective, I think the USA and Russia should just have sex and get it over with.

    We get it - you both love the military, you both hate minorities, you both want to restrict the rights and freedoms of your citizens.

    Just get a room, get it out of your systems, and maybe the rest of the world can finally get some much-needed peace this year.

  • stoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
    123·
    1 day ago

    Isn’t this due to the US not having a working census database?

    Please correct me if I am wrong.

    From what I have heard, you need to bring bills with your address to prove where you live in some circumstances in the US.

    Here in Sweden, or any sane country, I simply use my personal number to identify myself, and bam, the requesting entity can find the info they need.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
      2·
      6 hours ago

      Americans are not fans of centralized information on the population. It doesn’t help that the corporate equivalent to Voldemort is trying to sell it as a means of “law and order”. Something every American understands is meant to screw with us. Literally every time we give the government a new database they abuse it. The most recent is connecting a medical database to immigration enforcement.

      So yeah. If we could stop electing people under the motto, “The Cruelty Is The Point”, then we could have nice things.

    • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      6 hours ago

      The US is not only quit populous, our huge footprint and lack of government centralization causes a lot of stupid shit like using bills for proof of residence. Imagine tying 100s of thousands of databases together so the federal government can pull all info on a citizen.

      BTW, this is exactly what Palantir is accomplishing and we should be screaming about it.

      My wife had to sent utility bills with her name and our address on it to immigration to prove she didn’t marry for the green card and we’re actually living together. And don’t start me on our immigration system, totally and purposefully broken.

    • unsettlinglymoist@lemmy.world
      111·
      17 hours ago

      As an American/Swedish dual citizen…

      I think I’ve only had to show mail to prove my address when first getting a driver license in a new state. So that’s a thing yes, but not very common.

      Unlike in Sweden, in the US you don’t register/update your address with the authorities when you move. It’s not that the US doesn’t have a “working database” for that – it’s just not a thing at all, there’s no population register like in Sweden.

      In Sweden you use your personnummer for identification, but you also have secure authentication methods like BankID that aren’t available in the US. Your personnummer is public information and you’ll provide it just about everywhere because there’s little risk to you.

      In the US we use our social security numbers for both identification and authentication. Because they’re used for authentication, they’re considered secret and we’ll only share them when strictly required for necessary services (like government agencies and banks). This is obviously really poor security and they weren’t originally intended to be used for authentication, but it is what it is.

      Swedish system is of course more efficient and more secure.

      • village604@adultswim.fanEnglish
        2·
        12 hours ago

        I have to show my water bill to dump my monthly free truckload at the landfill, but that’s about it. Sometimes utilities require it too.

      • stoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
        5·
        16 hours ago

        Thank you for clarifying this!

        The US badly needs a population database, however, I absolutely understand that with how the US government have abused and fooled their citizens in the past, there is a huge distrust of the government among Americans.

    • MajorasMaskForever@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      1 day ago

      Kind of

      The vast majority of the time we use our social security numbers as a personal ID number. Drivers licenses also will have unique numbers on them which you can query off of, so too do passports.

      By law, no one is required to have any of those three. People having a social security number is pretty common, but getting one of those is the easiest of the three.

      Because none of them are a legal requirement to be a citizen, each one has multiple document set requirements, and if you have the other two, the third is trivial to obtain.

      The documents you need if you’re not leveraging another form of ID are basically a set of documents that aren’t that difficult for your average person to get their own copies of but harder for some one else to forge and claim to be another person

    • Zedd @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      92·
      1 day ago

      The US government has the information, but there’s no way for companies to sell you something if they used that data.

      It’s the same with US taxes. The IRS knows exactly how much you owe them each year. As a citizen, you cannot access that information. You have to fill out needlessly complicated forms to guess the correct amount of money to send them. If you guess wrong you can go to jail or be fined. To prevent this, you pay a company to fill out those forms. They don’t get access to the correct number either, but you can buy insurance from them so they’ll pay for your lawyer to defend you if you guess wrong.

  • Nanook@lemmy.zip
    1431·
    17 hours ago

    YSK this is another fine example of the need to label posts with “USA” when solely about USA in non-national communities.

    Edit for the Ameruskis: Us is a fucking word. [USA] that so the rest of US don’t need to deal with your fucking banana republic shit all the time.