OK, bear with me here. I’m still processing the adventure a friend and I had earlier this week as we attempted to elicit information, of the public record kind, from our country’s federal bureaucracy. I accompanied my friend on a quest for information about a long-deceased relative. Wow. After only a small glimpse into the inefficiencies of, well, everything, we could only wonder how our entire system has not yet imploded upon itself. First, some background:

This relative in question died in the mid-1930s, and my friend’s family knows that he never became naturalized as a citizen of the US. He was still a citizen of his native Italy as of the 1930 census, the only government document my friend has found thus far (found, by the way, via the genealogical website, http://www.ancestry.com). The relative died only a few short years later. My friend’s search this week is for proof of this lack of naturalization. In order to acquire some documents from Italy, he must show that a search has been conducted for naturalization papers and that they have never been found. Dates are sketchy, as the only living relative with information was just a child when this man died, so the family is working from approximations.

My friend, a very organized fellow, had all the paperwork he’d been able to gather thus far carefully compiled in a folder. He’d scoured the websites of the USCIS (that would be the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, formerly known as the …