Built by someone who did it the hard way first.

A month and a half. For one document.

That's how long it took me to track down a single marriage record for my wife's Romanian citizenship case. I already had the names. I had the dates. I had the town. None of it mattered — because the record wasn't in any archive I could find.

I ended up emailing a stranger I'd found on a genealogy forum — someone who happened to be a specialist on the history of one specific small town, 200 years ago. I was asking him things like "where did people actually keep their birth records back then?" He knew. Nobody else did. That's the kind of detective work this requires — for one document.

Then I found out my own great-great-great grandfather was from Quebec. I might qualify for Canadian citizenship by descent. So I started digging into my own case.

Same nightmare. Different country. Maine vital records told me they had nothing from before 1890. The churches sent me to the diocese. The diocese sent me to a different department. I tracked one institution after another for weeks — and when I finally found what I needed, some records simply didn't exist. I had to build a corroborating case from scratch — census records, death records, sibling baptisms — just to prove my ancestor was a real person. A month and a half of that before I could even start the 13-page IRCC application.

And after doing all that work myself? The lawyers still wanted thousands just to submit the application.

So I built one. What took me a month and a half the first time, my process now handles in an afternoon. But that's only possible because I made every mistake, hit every dead end, and solved every problem the hard way first.

Today, between my wife's Romanian citizenship and my Canadian case, our family can live and work anywhere in the US, Europe, or Canada. Bill C-3 passed just three months ago — my own application is in, built with the exact same process I use for every NorthClaim client.