Meet the researcher

I’m TJ Borriello, and I find the American records behind Italian citizenship claims. It’s precise, patient work. A claim can turn on a single line in a 1920 census, or a certificate number buried in a county court index. It is the whole of what I do.

This work is personal. My own line traces back to Italy, and the naturalization records I know best are my own family’s: the three index cards on this page, recording naturalizations granted by the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn between 1931 and 1957. I know how much a single documented record can mean. It is rarely only about a passport. It is about the shape of a family’s story. That’s the spirit I bring to every case: care for the record, and care for the person waiting on it.

I work to professional genealogical standards and stay strictly in my lane. I locate naturalization records and procure certified copies; when an ancestor never naturalized, I document that absence with the same rigor: no-record letters, certified census extracts, and USCIS index searches. Then I hand a clean, fully sourced packet to your Italian immigration attorney, who takes the legal questions from there.

Italian heritage is where I began, but the methods apply just as well to other European ancestry cases. Naturalization research, proof of non-naturalization, certified procurement: the work is the same. If your line runs somewhere else in the old country, it’s worth asking.