Katherine,

Don’t concern yourself about the handle. I think of it as truth in labeling

Thanks for your detailed answers. It didn’t wander or ramble from my perspective. It was coherent and made sense to me. A very good example of how someone looking from the outside can come to a different conclusion than someone with direct life experience.

I’ll have to go look up the naturalization oath. I know several Swedish expats who didn’t quite get around to naturalizing until Sweden altered its laws and allowed them to keep the original citizenship. That was the impetus for them to finally get off the dime and become naturalized US citizens. I don’t want start a discussion of the semi-bassackwardsness of that, but that’s how it was.

They had all the other pros and cons long since considered but never took the Big Step and actually pulled the trigger until surrendering their original citizenship was no longer required by that nation. I suppose that’s a very real form of allegiance, but for most of the people I know who did this, and its a bunch not just 2 or 3, their lives are here in the US but for whatever reason they couldn’t make the final cut.

But Swedes were never in the same boat as Poles, so keeping or cutting allegiances could be a very different thing.