By Georgina Brennan

At 51, Theresa Nolan is desperately seeking employment. Without a job Nolan won’t get American citizenship, something she assumed she already had because she has lived in the U.S. since she was two years old.

Nolan was born in Loughlinstown, Co. Dublin. After two years in an orphanage in Ireland an Irish American family adopted her.

They obtained a green card for in 1956 and with the help of a lawyer, they brought her to Jersey City, New Jersey. But they didn’t tell her she was adopted until 1969 and even then she didn’t know she wasn’t a U.S. citizen.

Up until this week Nolan, who went to school and took jobs and lived an American life, didn’t know she had to apply to be a citizen. She also didn’t know that to get citizenship it would help greatly if she had a job. And she is desperate to get citizenship.

“I would really like to get citizenship, to get my life in order and to find out about my Irish family,” she told the Irish Voice in the offices of Father Brian Jordan’s Immigration Services at St. Francis of Assisi Church in Manhattan.

This week Nolan, who is on public assistance, found out from her caseworker that she should apply for citizenship because her green card had not been renewed since 1956.

For almost 50 years Nolan has kept her green card safe. She never knew that if she had traveled outside the country with an expired green card, she could have been in trouble. She never knew she should have renewed it.

She never knew she had to apply to be an American citizen. She just presumed.

“You cannot take United States citizenship for granted. It is a privilege that you have to work hard for,” Jordan told the Irish Voice. “Unfortunately, there may be other people from Europe who were adopted during the 1950’s when there were fewer restrictions on adopting who also do not know that to become an American citizen you have to apply.”

Nolan was 15 when she first ran away from home. Her childhood was troubled, she says. On one of these occasions the local police found her and brought her home to her parents. Her mother was distraught.

“She was crying and she said, ‘I’m sorry we didn’t tell you that you were adopted.’ She thought that’s why I had run away. I ran away because I didn’t get on with them, there were some problems. They were already in their 40s when I came along. I had never known I was adopted until then,” she says.

That was in 1969. It was not until 1977 when her father died — her mother passed away in 1976 — that she finally got her adoption papers and discovered that she was born in Dublin.

At that point, the prospect of a whole new past opened up in her imagination and Nolan began to feel some hope that she could find her family in Ireland. She hoped that maybe she had brothers and sisters because she had always wished she had someone to talk to.

“Nobody ever told me I was adopted. I was an only child and I always wished I had a sister or brother, it just would have made a lot of things easier,” she says.

Despite the fact that Nolan was desperate to find a family and eager to reconnect with Ireland and her roots, she had no clue how to go about it. She had nowhere to turn.

Then the years passed. She had already given birth to a little girl. Time went by quickly as she cared for her child. Then she got breast cancer.

Now her cancer is gone and her daughter is 31 with two children of her own.

“Now I really want to find out about my life, about my past, about my family. I would like to know how come I’ve had arthritis since I was little, if the breast cancer was passed on to me, if there are other things, health things that I could have passed on to my daughter, to my grandchildren.”

Nolan is willing to do anything to get her citizenship so she can get a fresh start and maybe visit Ireland for the first time since she was two. All she needs is a job and the price of the application, almost $400. She has neither, but she has hope.

“Theresa can file an application for a green card renewal an I-90 and an N-400 form for applying to become a naturalized citizen of the United States. But it is not easy to get citizenship. She has to get a job,” says Jordan.

Oddly enough, Nolan could have become a citizen years ago. The only thing that stopped her was that her parents never applied for her.

“Before 1976 it was easier to adopt from Europe and many Americans did adopt children. Theresa’s parents maybe did not know how to file an application for citizenship or that they needed to do that. That could be very common, immigration was not such a big issue in the fifties,” Jordan says.

“There could be more people like Theresa out there and if there are, they should call me. I am going to try to help Theresa and the New York office of Citizenship and Immigration Services have been very helpful in this matter, they tell me I always bring them the unusual cases. We are going to help her,” says Jordan, promising to pull out all the stops to give one Irish woman a Happy St. Patrick’s Day.