The Path to Citizenship in Idaho

by Christa White

My mother’s family has a long history in Idaho. It took me all of fifteen minutes to locate an ancestor with naturalization papers from Pocatello. For generations, my ancestors were farmers in Germany. I was told by my grandmother that the Vollmers migrated to Russia in the 19th century after the Tsar promised new migrants their own land plots, free of charge. This is why A. Vollmer’s birthplace is Russia, although you will see on his Petition for Naturalization that his race is listed as German. Near the end of the 19th century, Andrew Vollmer, my great-great grandfather, along with his wife and children migrated to the United States and then moved West to seek farming opportunities. The above images are Andrew’s Declaration of Intention and Petition for Naturalization (Figures 1 and 2), and below is his Oath of Allegiance.

The Vollmer family migration story has many parallels to the stories of Japanese American migrants that came to the U.S. and Idaho. Unfortunately, the story I hoped to tell, the story of Japanese American naturalization, does not share many parallels with my family’s experience in seeking citizenship. After extensively searching Family History and Ancestry.com collections, as well as the National Archives, and any other digital resources I could locate, there is only a hint of Japanese Americans in Idaho seeking citizenship. First, in a Google Sheets record of Ada County, Idaho, naturalizations, I found the names of six immigrants who claimed Japan as their birthplace: Edwin T. Komatsubara, Harry C. Kumamato, Yasunobu Mototake, Kuna Nagura, Geogero C. Tanaker, and Henry M. Yoshikawa.^[1] The first record, Edwin Komatsubara, indicates that he was granted citizenship, but is missing a date. I could not find any such records of his naturalization. Five of the six records were only Declarations of Intention, implying that these individuals began the process for naturalization, but for each of them, the process was cut short. Most of the names listed had submitted their declarations between 1900-1910. President Theodore Roosevelt himself urged Congress in 1906 to pass an act that granted Japanese immigrants the opportunity to pursue citizenship, and by 1910, according to historian Yuji Ichioka, 420 Issei had naturalized as citizens.^[2] We know that ultimately this initiative was unsuccessful, blocked by a Supreme Court decision in 1922, and Japanese Americans would not be allowed citizenship for at least four more decades. I could not find copies of any of these declarations, in fact the only piece of documentation that I was able to find was Harry C. Kumamoto’s name twice on an Ada County Naturalization records ledger, which I have included below.

I admit I was frustrated and disappointed at the lack of records available about the naturalization process for Japanese Americans residing in Idaho, especially considering there is evidence that some Issei did attempt at the process, and the Issei were such an important part of the sugar beet and railroad industries in Eastern Idaho. However, I learned an additional lesson about the impacts of disenfranchisement and of excluding certain groups. In this case, these six Japanese Americans that originally applied for naturalization disappeared from the pages of history (perhaps not entirely but finding them is beyond my resources). More significantly though, I wonder at the number of Japanese Americans in Idaho that were discouraged from even attempting to gain citizenship due to the failures of others that they were certainly aware of. Because of this premature disqualification, we may never know the intentions of Japanese Americans that resided in Idaho- their purpose in Idaho and their plans for settling here or returning to Japan. In the worst cases, these individuals may disappear entirely. Ultimately, exclusion damages the process and goals of writing history and has thus deprived the story of Idaho’s marvelous past of a unique facet of diversity that no longer exists here to the same extent today.

^[1] AR 202, Ada County Naturalizations, Box 3, Folder 7.

^[2] Kawakami, K. K. "The Naturalization of Japanese. What It Would Mean to the United States," The North American Review 185, no. 617 (1907): 394; Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924 (New York: Free Press, 1990), 211.

Figures 1-3 were taken from my Family History family tree, Figures 4-5 were taken from Ancestry.com.

Christa is a history graduate student and teaching assistant for an amazing professor at Idaho State University. She enjoys reading, gardening, baking, puzzling, hiking, fishing, eating, but most of all learning new things. She has been a student in some capacity for most of her life and hopes to continue this into the foreseeable future. Topics that interest her are international relations, global and Middle Eastern studies, Arabic and foreign languages, history (obviously), coding and GIS, to name a few. She has seven siblings and is from Boise, Idaho.