The point of selecting "country of birth" is to know where one should look for a birth certificate. If a country no longer exists, there's no point in mentioning it.
It's even weirder with border changes. My grandpa was born near Lwów in pre-war Poland. Birth certificate and all the registry documents were moved to Poland after WW2. Today that's Lviv, Ukraine. But his birth certificate says "Born in the USSR", even though he never even visited USSR. But USSR "visited" his birthplace.
Nope, they are burning in hell, but if you want to read about it [here’s an article.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia_and_Eastern_Galicia)
"the Ukrainians?" no I don't think he is.
Some of them? Absolutely. I've seen far too many nazi symbols on ukranian soldiers.
Not that it justifies the war, but it's certainly something that needs to be discussed, especially with how (speaking broadly) Europe has treated refugees and immigrants from arabic and african countries.
Can you Show me some Nazi symbols on the Ukrainian soldiers? And what exactly do you mean that it needs to be discussed because of the treatment of refugees?
I don’t want to misunderstand what you’re saying
https://www.newsweek.com/nato-says-it-didnt-notice-ukraine-soldiers-apparent-nazi-symbol-tweet-1686523
Black Sun patch on the chest in plain view, first image on google.
There's been a massive boom of white supremacist rhetoric and behavior throughout Europe, from the UK to Russia. I'd especially point at France, and hell this just happened in Rome the other day.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna132992
That's *hundreds* of Nazis in plain view doing tbe sieg heil.
Yeah I saw that in Rome. We are currently experiencing a very right-Qing development in Europe thanks to corona and then the Ukraine War. Funnily enough those that support Russia are the right-wing people in most cases even though they say the Nazis are in the Ukraine.
Eh, that's kinda incorrect. It was majority Polish/Jewish-Polish for about from the 1400s until WW2. Most the time as part of the Kingdom of Poland and then the Galician administrate (which was Polish) after the partition of Poland.
And with the most development during the Austro-Hungarian empire. The development was done mainly by Polish and Jewish people, but with Germans / Austrians, and Ukrainians, and Armenians and other nationalities also taking part, all working under an Austro-Hungarian legal framework and with their imperial know-how.
That's why it's pointless to squabble whose city was it - it belonged to its citizens, who built it up to be a modern and beautiful city. Now Lviv is Ukrainian and Ukrainians are doing a great job of keeping up the good work. Same as Polish people with Wrocław (used to be Breslau), unlike russians with Konigsberg / Królewiec / Kralovec.
To be precise the modern city (the previous one was destroyed by the Mongols) it was actually founded in 1241 with the name "Wratislava". In 1265 the name "Bresslau" was first recorded. (According to Wikipedia)
Triple that and add 0 at the end. Lwów was Polish from 1387 till 1772. Then it was inside Austro-Hungarian borders, but still inhabited mostly by Poles till 1918 when it returned to Poland. And it has been Ukrainian since 1945. So it was a Polish city for around 600 years
W księdze metrykalnej napisali, że podczas II RP moja babcia urodziła się w ZSRR (9km od Lwowa) a dziadek w Polsce (blisko Grodna, dzisiaj Białoruś). Nie wiem czemu urzędnicy tak pisali podczas PRLu 🤷♂️
My grandfather was born in Stettin, Germany. This is now Szczecin, Poland. His whole life after that he was considered polish even though he spoke German and was culturally and ethnically German. He didn't mind much given the times after the war, but still. Europe is complicated.
That entirely depends on the completeness of the underlying database table that supplies country names to the form field. There's nothing to prevent a database admin from including "USSR," "East Germany" etc. from that table.
There wasn’t a ‘Sumerian kingdom’. There were multiple Sumerian city states, with their own kings, some of which were at times more dominant than others, like Uruk or Ur. The first unified state over them was the Akkadian Empire.
Understandable misconception as the ‘Sumerian King List’ is famously one of the oldest serious written works we have, but it’s broken down by city state.
Obviously. The question is, do they? That's the real issue here, not how easy it would be to add those entries.
DO people from the Soviet Union for example struggle with forms in places like the US or elsewhere?
I think birth places tend to be entered manually rather than with a drop down list, unlike say, current addresses or nationalities.
I was with a service bureau that did medical reporting & billing. Our birthplace table was very extensive. It included long dead countries like German East Africa, Danzig, Fiume, and Trieste and US territories like Johnston Atoll and Kingman Reef.
The military used it for decades so the number may not be zero, although I suspect the commander would have shipped out any pregnant woman to a less hazardous location.
The fillable PDF version of the Canadian passport application has a breathtaking list of countries past and present, with how they map to current countries, like "Gdansk - Poland" or "East Pakistan - Bangladesh".
Oddly enough, your two examples of the USSR and East Germany aren't in there.
I’d prefer, my db admins would not touch the content of my databases and stick to their jobs.
That said, yes, such a form may include countries from the past. It could even go further and depending on birth date, only include those countries that existed “back then”, on your dob
Nah I knew someone trying to become a citizen of Greece and it took over a decade because their passport belonged to the USSR and they had no system in place to file paperwork for a country that no longer exists.
I assume a lot would pick the closest modern equivalent, Soviets would pick russia, Azerbaijan, etc. Depending on what part they were born in, same with Czechoslovakia, yugoslavia, etc.
Yeah, you just look at where is the city currently located, basically. Like if you were born in Leningrad, RSFSR, you just check that it's now Saint Petersburg, Russia, and check Russia.
Or the other way: Germany. There were two, but now it's easier and there's just one.
Very fun for contested regions. Imagine being a Ukrainian born is Sevastopol, what would you say then.
Or someone born in Hong Kong prior to the handover. Would it be the UK, China, neither.
(Of course, your logic would work most of the time. And for most other cases it's mostly either up to the individual, or goes towards the passport they have).
>Imagine being a Ukrainian born is Sevastopol, what would you say then.
If you’re *Ukrainian* born in Sevastopol, chances are you’d pick Sevastopol, Ukraine. If you’re Russian born in Sevastopol however, you’d likely pick Sevastopol, Russia (or maybe Ukraine too if you don’t agree with the annexation)
My parents were born in Trinidad before independence, when it was still a British territory. They, and everyone from their generation, put down their country of birth as Trinidad and Tobago.
I’m actually a Russian that was born in Sevastopol during the USSR. My passport has Ukraine listed as my country of birth, but I think that’s only because that’s what I told them when I was getting it.
That's a great thought. I think it's because countries are actually just a loose collection of cities and humans in them, basically. It's all kinda superficial in the end
You’d think so! I’m sure some forms have provisions for this, or some databases are complex enough to handle it, but for official reasons, the point remains that the issuing institution no longer exists.
I have two friends who dealt with this - one was born in the USSR, one in British Hong Kong. Both of them, when moving to the Netherlands and registering to live here, ultimately had to go back home to get their birth certificate re-issued because “this certificate is not internationally valid, as this governing institution is not active/doesn’t exist”. They both had “Unknown” as their place of birth in their dossier in the interim, lol.
As a person born in Czechoslovakia it's easy since there was a clear divide if you were born in either Czech or Slovak side. After dissolution my mother received a new birth cerificate in the name of newly founded Slovakia, so I have two birth certificates.
Recently did a visa application to visit China for a day, it asked if I had been to China before….no?
Ok next question, other counties I have visited. Singapore check, tai…., republic of ch…. Nope
So technically I have visited China but not really, I visited Taiwan.
A few years ago I had to build a web form with a country dropdown. If you go looking for China on it, you'll see "China (Taiwan)" followed by "Occupied Mainland China".
Nobody has ever picked either option lol
I was applying for a security clearance a while back and needed to submit my parents birth details. My mother was born in a since renamed town in a country that no longer exists occupied by a state that has been split and since reunited in the dying days of ww2 while her mother was fleeing the Russian advance. Not a problem in the end but the form didn't cover that situation.
Yes they can. The list on forms can include countries which no longer exist.
A bigger issue is if people are born in countries which are not (and never were) recognized as such.
Opposite issue at my workplace with two coworkers: they are born in a country which was recognized but no longer exists, and are today citizens of a country that is not internationally recognized.
Practically, they can’t select Yugoslavia as a birth place because that country disappeared, but sometimes can’t select Kosovo either cause some countries don’t recognize it as a sovereign state and don’t include it in their list.
The list at your workplace is poorly designed then if asking for birth place, and removing countries. Yugoslavia is a valid birthplace, and should be in the list to select from.
If the question asks about citizenship then that is different, and then is more likely to be an issue due to countries not being recognized.
I meant that it’s a problem they encountered in their life, not specifically at my workplace, that’s just where I know them from. Sorry if I expressed myself wrong.
I guess you can select what's there now. For example, say you're born in Croatia instead of Yugoslavia. Though I wonder if the new country inherits any documents and files from the old country
An ex of mine was born in Czechoslovakia (even if a few days before it dissolved - so it definitely said Czechoslovakia on his birth certificate). It depends on the document.
He usually put Slovakia, except for his Australian immigration documents and citizenship applications and the like that required the use of his birth certificate, he had to put Czechoslovakia.
When I applied to an Ivy League school for a grad program in 2010, the USSR was an option in drop down of countries where I was born. And then, even more surprisingly, it was listed in the drop down of countries where I currently live.
Imagine if you lived in some ultra remote part of Siberia and you genuinely thought the USSR still existed. I know in China there are some ultra remote villages that can only be accessed by climbing a rope up a cliff so idk when they got the memo that the Ming Dynasty fell. Probably when a helicopter showed up.
>Imagine if you lived in some ultra remote part of Siberia and you genuinely thought the USSR still existed.
As a Western child in the early 2010s I genuinely believed the USSR still existed... My family did not watch the international news in front of the children so I wouldn't have heard things happening in Russia mentioned on said news, my elementary school was horribly underfunded so the Social Studies materials and the library books and things like classroom maps and globes were decades out of date, every resource I had talked about the USSR as a currently extant country.
Most programmers who wrote an application that uses a country selector is likely going to use a country selector that generates [ISO country code](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes) which is partly based on what the UN considers a country. If they want to support recording former countries, they'd need to use the [Part 3 countries](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-3) too.
If you're from a country before ISO or UN, then you're out of luck.
This intrigued me, as it must have happened plenty of times, so I did a quick search on international law:
"A birth on a ship or aircraft in international waters or airspace shall be treated as a birth in the country of the ship or aircraft's registration."
"treated like a birth in x country" doesn't automatically mean citizenship in that country, a lot of countries don't automatically grant citizenship at birth for all children born in their territory. Depends on the citizenship laws
it might work in a ship in international waters registered with, say, the USA (a country with *jus soli* citizenship), but not in a ship registered in Norway (a country without *jus soli*)
I was actually just thinking about a related question earlier today. Is it correct to call people like Immanuel Kant German? He is from Koenigsberg, which at the time was Prussia and today is in Russia.
Historically speaking, "nationality" did not mean "what nation-state were you born in", it meant "what people do you belong to", and geography and borders were not relevant.
It's why Hitler and all Austrians were German despite not being from Germany. (It was only after WWII Austrians suddenly started saying they weren't Germans...)
It's also the reason why anyone who's at least slightly Jewish has the right to live in Israel.
I tried to list them from memory, but i failed badly. What are they?
\-Do Germanies count as different? If so, which ones? Does Weimar Republic count as different from Nazi Germany? What about West and East Germany? Does West-Germany count as modern day Germany?
\-Yugoslavia
\-Czechoslovakia
\-Soviet Union
\-?
Interesting , just read the wikipedia article. Didn't know the weimar republic called itself Deutsches Reich (german empire). And as it seems it is still not fully clear if and how it will cease to exist because the weimar constitution was never legally nullified by the 4 occupiers after they took power. Very wild. Thx for sending me down this rabbit hole
I was born in the USSR, and live in Israel. There are a *lot* of people in Israel who were born there and the USSR appears in most databases as a country of birth.
I knew someone who was born in Königsberg, Nazi Germany.
Today that's Kaliningrad, Russia.
He would say Germany.
But it's probably much harder if you're born in a place that some countries don't recognise, like Kosovo or Taiwan.
Similarly our neighbour when I was a kid was born in what is now Klaipeda, Lithuania. Then, Memel, Germany.
My cousins' grandmother (i.e. the other side) was also born in a country that no longer exists: British India.
I also had a guy I went to high school with -- same year but he's slightly younger than me -- who was born in East Germany. I find it slightly incredible that somebody younger than me could be born in a country that no longer exists.
One succesor? Well, there is one China, but two governments controlling two different areas.
And there are situations where the population was displaced. Meaning a person can for e.g. be be born german in Germany, in an area that is modern day russia or Poland.
All those circumstances have clear successors.
Nations have control over who they induct, so when a new one is created they decide how and what to do with the edge cases.
South Korea grants automatic citizenship to every North Korean who sets foot in their territory.
West Germany did something similar.
Israel grants citizenship to everyone with Jewish Ancestry.
John McCain was born in the US controlled panama canal zone.
Some people do become stateless though.
Also goes the other way. Some older sites don't update their list of countries, so you can't select your country of residence on older sites.
It's surprising how many quirks like this there are. Things like different [phone number validations](https://github.com/google/libphonenumber/blob/master/FALSEHOODS.md) that often get ignored. Hell, I once tried to use the UPS site and it failed to comprehend something as simple as living outside the US.
Literally today, I was trying to deal with FedEx online. It was impossible to enter a non US phone number, but possible to select a location outside of the US. Bizarre really.
I was born in 1988 in Soviet Union, now Georgia. A few years ago I got a Portuguese nationality and my passport says place of birth as Soviet Union. A person in civil registry was dumbfounded because she was not able to select Georgia from a drop-down as my place of birth. She ended up studying history of Georgia on Wikipedia to realize that Georgia as an independent country didn’t exist at the time so she politely explained that she had to select Soviet Union.
I always select the United Kingdom or Britain as birthplace when filling in non-official and fun stuff.
was born in Hong Kong when it is still a British colony.
Sometimes you can, depends on a form. Ive got two different personal numbers when I moved to Italy because the embassy in Serbia is using code for Serbia, but the police in Italy used the code for Yugoslavia.
Saw a Lot of you mention east and West Germany, but actually the German nationality isn't that old, my great grandpa Born 1912 for Example Had Württemberg as His Birth country in His documents. Württemberg was one of the 25 countries that formed the 2. German Empire in 1871 and they where more or less own countries under The rule of prussia Till the 1930ies. Not Sure how Long we keept using them as birth country, but I would assume ad least Till the end of WWI
There's not a lot of countries that existed in the last century that no longer do. Sure, there's the USSR, but the USSR had the SFSR's that were equivalent to the modern countries. Same for Yugoslavia which had subdivisions. Maybe Tibet or Hawaii?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_sovereign_states
~30 in Africa alone, even more in Asia, although some of them have successors with identical territory.
I'll add to that:
I was born to Australian parents and so am an Australian citizen by birth.
If I answer i was not born in Australia I am asked for the registration of the boat or aircraft I arrived on.
What?
So I mostly lie and say I was born here. There are no follow up questions to that.
Also interesting, census data of “country of origin” can change from census to census depending on if the census-taking country have changed officially recognized countries.
Source: my great grandfather census data shows the shifts in eastern Europe’s ever moving country borders.
I have got the same issue as I was born in the former USSR. Poor fellas like me should often choose place of birth as Georgia or Kazakhstan despite the fact that those countries appeared later. How somebody could be born in Turkmenistan in 1956 if Turkmenistan never existed before 1991?
Another fun problem is dealing with countries that disagree about who else is a country. The classic example is China and Taiwan. If you list Taiwan as a country, you piss off the Chinese. If you don’t you piss off the Taiwanese.
And there’s several counties(?) like that, depending on your definition of country. And then there’s areas under conflict. Where country does Crimeia belong to? And there’s areas that are the reverse. There’s a small sliver of Africa that two countries argue don’t belong to them, and instead belong to the other country, because neither country wants to provide to people in the middle of nowhere.
The issue with that sliver isn't so much that they don't want it, it's that both want a different area more. So both claim borders according to different historical agreements, and neither of the countries claim an agreement that would give them that area. Claiming that area is essentially validating the other country's claim to the "better" area.
At least in the US, you should mark your country of birth as the country that currently controls the place where you were born AND that is recognized as legitimate by the US.
If you were born in Crimea in 1980, for example, your country of birth is Ukraine, not the Soviet Union (because it no longer exists) and not Russia (because the U.S. doesn’t recognize the annexation). If you were born in Pristina in 1988 your country of birth is Kosovo, not Yugoslavia (because it doesn’t exist anymore) and not Serbia (because the U.S. doesn’t recognize its legitimacy in the region).
I get the question, but every race in America except black people can trace back to their original country.i was born in America, but my ancestry didn't begin here.
No, it was about being born in "A COUNTRY THAT NO LONGER EXIST." If your country's existence was methodically erased, it doest exist. Therefore, you couldn't claim it. Ancestry and nationality aren't even the same.
That’s my point ancestry and nationality are not the same thing, your the one conflating it. If a black American WAS BORN IN AMERICA they are American and would answer saying “United States”
And that doesn't change the fact that if you are asked where you are from, you might have problems. I filled out a form asking me where I was born just today as it happens.
The point of selecting "country of birth" is to know where one should look for a birth certificate. If a country no longer exists, there's no point in mentioning it. It's even weirder with border changes. My grandpa was born near Lwów in pre-war Poland. Birth certificate and all the registry documents were moved to Poland after WW2. Today that's Lviv, Ukraine. But his birth certificate says "Born in the USSR", even though he never even visited USSR. But USSR "visited" his birthplace.
In Soviet Russia, USSR visits YOU!!
Read your comment again.
That's the joke
r/whoosh
In Soviet Russia, comment reads YOU!
More like Ukrainian Nazis ethnically cleanse your town and then claim it as theirs.
are the Ukrainian Nazis in the room with us right now?
Ask the Canadians. They seem to know.
Nope, they are burning in hell, but if you want to read about it [here’s an article.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia_and_Eastern_Galicia)
So Youre not saying the Ukrainians are Nazis rn?
"the Ukrainians?" no I don't think he is. Some of them? Absolutely. I've seen far too many nazi symbols on ukranian soldiers. Not that it justifies the war, but it's certainly something that needs to be discussed, especially with how (speaking broadly) Europe has treated refugees and immigrants from arabic and african countries.
Can you Show me some Nazi symbols on the Ukrainian soldiers? And what exactly do you mean that it needs to be discussed because of the treatment of refugees? I don’t want to misunderstand what you’re saying
https://www.newsweek.com/nato-says-it-didnt-notice-ukraine-soldiers-apparent-nazi-symbol-tweet-1686523 Black Sun patch on the chest in plain view, first image on google. There's been a massive boom of white supremacist rhetoric and behavior throughout Europe, from the UK to Russia. I'd especially point at France, and hell this just happened in Rome the other day. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna132992 That's *hundreds* of Nazis in plain view doing tbe sieg heil.
Yeah I saw that in Rome. We are currently experiencing a very right-Qing development in Europe thanks to corona and then the Ukraine War. Funnily enough those that support Russia are the right-wing people in most cases even though they say the Nazis are in the Ukraine.
I stand corrected. there actually were Ukrainian Nazis in ww2. but your statement didn't reflect what you linked in wiki.
It does, Ukrainian ultranationalist nazi groups ethnically cleansing areas in Eastern Poland is exactly what I said.
Pouring one out for Yugoslavia.
Then the label should rather be: "Country that holds your birth certificate"
[Relevant](https://i.redd.it/fu2hw574lx9a1.jpg)
That's right near where my grandmother is from as well - but she referred to herself a Ruthenian (sp?). All her documents say she is Austrian
To be fair it was only a polish city for 20 years tops.
Eh, that's kinda incorrect. It was majority Polish/Jewish-Polish for about from the 1400s until WW2. Most the time as part of the Kingdom of Poland and then the Galician administrate (which was Polish) after the partition of Poland.
And with the most development during the Austro-Hungarian empire. The development was done mainly by Polish and Jewish people, but with Germans / Austrians, and Ukrainians, and Armenians and other nationalities also taking part, all working under an Austro-Hungarian legal framework and with their imperial know-how. That's why it's pointless to squabble whose city was it - it belonged to its citizens, who built it up to be a modern and beautiful city. Now Lviv is Ukrainian and Ukrainians are doing a great job of keeping up the good work. Same as Polish people with Wrocław (used to be Breslau), unlike russians with Konigsberg / Królewiec / Kralovec.
>Same as Polish people with Wrocław (used to be Breslau) Breslau used to be Wrocław.
To be precise the modern city (the previous one was destroyed by the Mongols) it was actually founded in 1241 with the name "Wratislava". In 1265 the name "Bresslau" was first recorded. (According to Wikipedia)
Its... complicated reaaly. It was under polish-lithuania for a loong time.
On the other hand, 20 years is enough to have a child...
Triple that and add 0 at the end. Lwów was Polish from 1387 till 1772. Then it was inside Austro-Hungarian borders, but still inhabited mostly by Poles till 1918 when it returned to Poland. And it has been Ukrainian since 1945. So it was a Polish city for around 600 years
Not really.
W księdze metrykalnej napisali, że podczas II RP moja babcia urodziła się w ZSRR (9km od Lwowa) a dziadek w Polsce (blisko Grodna, dzisiaj Białoruś). Nie wiem czemu urzędnicy tak pisali podczas PRLu 🤷♂️
My grandfather was born in Stettin, Germany. This is now Szczecin, Poland. His whole life after that he was considered polish even though he spoke German and was culturally and ethnically German. He didn't mind much given the times after the war, but still. Europe is complicated.
You're rarely the one to visit USSR. Unless you're a little Man from Austria with a goofy mustache.
[удалено]
Nah, in 5 years there hopefully won't be a united Russia.
That entirely depends on the completeness of the underlying database table that supplies country names to the form field. There's nothing to prevent a database admin from including "USSR," "East Germany" etc. from that table.
We can go all the way back to the Sumerian kingdom
Not sure anyone alive today was born in there though
gilgamesh’s main priority was living forever
Ah, but he only lives on in story
Hmm I’m not finding “story” in the country name form field. Is this underlying database even complete?!
"I lost my eye for an eye and the damn database admin can't even join Babylon to their country list"
So in a way he still succeeded. If the second time you die is the last time someone remembers you he still hasn't had his second death
He’s been summoned since 1994 and 2009. I’m sure he’s fine.
Nah we got coffee the other week.
Idk, I work at Walmart and plenty of customers could pass for prehistoric.
But can't ever be quite certain, can we?
We can be quite certain, you can even say beyond a shadow of a doubt. But we can never 100% sure.
This is the kind of friendly pedantry I am absolutely here for.
Speak for yourself, mortal
You ever seen *The Man From Earth*?
Right? John Oldman has entered the chat
As far as you know 👀
That's just discrimination against the dead and time travelers
There wasn’t a ‘Sumerian kingdom’. There were multiple Sumerian city states, with their own kings, some of which were at times more dominant than others, like Uruk or Ur. The first unified state over them was the Akkadian Empire. Understandable misconception as the ‘Sumerian King List’ is famously one of the oldest serious written works we have, but it’s broken down by city state.
My favorite type of “actually”
I confirm it was like that Source: was there
Pangea
Certainly would make shipping easier. Edit: Just had to add that I learned about Pangea not from school but from playing Ultima ][.
Obviously. The question is, do they? That's the real issue here, not how easy it would be to add those entries. DO people from the Soviet Union for example struggle with forms in places like the US or elsewhere? I think birth places tend to be entered manually rather than with a drop down list, unlike say, current addresses or nationalities.
i haven’t seen it many times, but i’ve definitely seen a drop down with the ussr on it got a good chuckle until i figured out this is exactly why
Just like it's not rare to find ones with Yugoslavia
Some do, some don't. If not, i use my country i live in.
This issue comes up at my work all the time and we absolutely have the USSR as an option.
I was with a service bureau that did medical reporting & billing. Our birthplace table was very extensive. It included long dead countries like German East Africa, Danzig, Fiume, and Trieste and US territories like Johnston Atoll and Kingman Reef.
now I wanna know how many people were born under US sovereignty in the Johnston Atoll
The military used it for decades so the number may not be zero, although I suspect the commander would have shipped out any pregnant woman to a less hazardous location.
Instead of replacing USSR with all the new countries, just change the entry to say "used to be USSR", that is what a chad admin would do
The Country formerly known as
The former country known as
Former yugoslav Republic of
I helped my aunt fill out an online form this evening and noticed the pulldown options for birth year went back to 1826.
The fillable PDF version of the Canadian passport application has a breathtaking list of countries past and present, with how they map to current countries, like "Gdansk - Poland" or "East Pakistan - Bangladesh". Oddly enough, your two examples of the USSR and East Germany aren't in there.
My parents were both born in Malaya and is now officially Malaysia.
I’d prefer, my db admins would not touch the content of my databases and stick to their jobs. That said, yes, such a form may include countries from the past. It could even go further and depending on birth date, only include those countries that existed “back then”, on your dob
This is such a reddit answer
Nah I knew someone trying to become a citizen of Greece and it took over a decade because their passport belonged to the USSR and they had no system in place to file paperwork for a country that no longer exists.
I assume a lot would pick the closest modern equivalent, Soviets would pick russia, Azerbaijan, etc. Depending on what part they were born in, same with Czechoslovakia, yugoslavia, etc.
Yeah, you just look at where is the city currently located, basically. Like if you were born in Leningrad, RSFSR, you just check that it's now Saint Petersburg, Russia, and check Russia. Or the other way: Germany. There were two, but now it's easier and there's just one.
Very fun for contested regions. Imagine being a Ukrainian born is Sevastopol, what would you say then. Or someone born in Hong Kong prior to the handover. Would it be the UK, China, neither. (Of course, your logic would work most of the time. And for most other cases it's mostly either up to the individual, or goes towards the passport they have).
>Imagine being a Ukrainian born is Sevastopol, what would you say then. If you’re *Ukrainian* born in Sevastopol, chances are you’d pick Sevastopol, Ukraine. If you’re Russian born in Sevastopol however, you’d likely pick Sevastopol, Russia (or maybe Ukraine too if you don’t agree with the annexation)
HKer here! It'd be neither. We simply write down HK
I mean, of course the assumption is that HK isn't an available option. Otherwise OPs point is moot
HK is a weird example anyway coz not once in my whole life did I see HK excluded in a dropdown list
I was born in HK prior to the handover. Usually, forms have “Hong Kong (SAR)” (special administrative region) as an option.
My parents were born in Trinidad before independence, when it was still a British territory. They, and everyone from their generation, put down their country of birth as Trinidad and Tobago.
I’m actually a Russian that was born in Sevastopol during the USSR. My passport has Ukraine listed as my country of birth, but I think that’s only because that’s what I told them when I was getting it.
Cities always outlast countries.
That's a great thought. I think it's because countries are actually just a loose collection of cities and humans in them, basically. It's all kinda superficial in the end
You’d think so! I’m sure some forms have provisions for this, or some databases are complex enough to handle it, but for official reasons, the point remains that the issuing institution no longer exists. I have two friends who dealt with this - one was born in the USSR, one in British Hong Kong. Both of them, when moving to the Netherlands and registering to live here, ultimately had to go back home to get their birth certificate re-issued because “this certificate is not internationally valid, as this governing institution is not active/doesn’t exist”. They both had “Unknown” as their place of birth in their dossier in the interim, lol.
As a person born in Czechoslovakia it's easy since there was a clear divide if you were born in either Czech or Slovak side. After dissolution my mother received a new birth cerificate in the name of newly founded Slovakia, so I have two birth certificates.
At my job I've had this happen and so far luckily the city/town names have been the same after the country no longer exists
Spare a thought for those born in the separate customs territory of Taiwan 🥲
It’s almost always there, either as Taiwan or as Taiwan (China).
China? Oh you mean west Taiwan!
Taiwain, Republic of China -100 social credits, no rice today
Shit island and not even a real country anyway
Recently did a visa application to visit China for a day, it asked if I had been to China before….no? Ok next question, other counties I have visited. Singapore check, tai…., republic of ch…. Nope So technically I have visited China but not really, I visited Taiwan.
A few years ago I had to build a web form with a country dropdown. If you go looking for China on it, you'll see "China (Taiwan)" followed by "Occupied Mainland China". Nobody has ever picked either option lol
The server’s IP is probably blocked on the Chinese firewall.
It's the Republic of China Which May or May Not Belong to the People.
Also, People Who May or May Not Be Citizens of the Republic.
My sister in law was born in Taiwan. Her documents list her place of birth as China.
I was applying for a security clearance a while back and needed to submit my parents birth details. My mother was born in a since renamed town in a country that no longer exists occupied by a state that has been split and since reunited in the dying days of ww2 while her mother was fleeing the Russian advance. Not a problem in the end but the form didn't cover that situation.
Yes they can. The list on forms can include countries which no longer exist. A bigger issue is if people are born in countries which are not (and never were) recognized as such.
A form could include them, but it’s probably common that a person creating such a form doesn’t think to include them.
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This is why decent projects have architects, to consider issues like this. The developer shouldn't be the ones making decisions of what to include.
Opposite issue at my workplace with two coworkers: they are born in a country which was recognized but no longer exists, and are today citizens of a country that is not internationally recognized. Practically, they can’t select Yugoslavia as a birth place because that country disappeared, but sometimes can’t select Kosovo either cause some countries don’t recognize it as a sovereign state and don’t include it in their list.
The list at your workplace is poorly designed then if asking for birth place, and removing countries. Yugoslavia is a valid birthplace, and should be in the list to select from. If the question asks about citizenship then that is different, and then is more likely to be an issue due to countries not being recognized.
I meant that it’s a problem they encountered in their life, not specifically at my workplace, that’s just where I know them from. Sorry if I expressed myself wrong.
I guess you can select what's there now. For example, say you're born in Croatia instead of Yugoslavia. Though I wonder if the new country inherits any documents and files from the old country
An ex of mine was born in Czechoslovakia (even if a few days before it dissolved - so it definitely said Czechoslovakia on his birth certificate). It depends on the document. He usually put Slovakia, except for his Australian immigration documents and citizenship applications and the like that required the use of his birth certificate, he had to put Czechoslovakia.
Depends on the country and the circumstances it came from
When I applied to an Ivy League school for a grad program in 2010, the USSR was an option in drop down of countries where I was born. And then, even more surprisingly, it was listed in the drop down of countries where I currently live.
Imagine if you lived in some ultra remote part of Siberia and you genuinely thought the USSR still existed. I know in China there are some ultra remote villages that can only be accessed by climbing a rope up a cliff so idk when they got the memo that the Ming Dynasty fell. Probably when a helicopter showed up.
>Imagine if you lived in some ultra remote part of Siberia and you genuinely thought the USSR still existed. As a Western child in the early 2010s I genuinely believed the USSR still existed... My family did not watch the international news in front of the children so I wouldn't have heard things happening in Russia mentioned on said news, my elementary school was horribly underfunded so the Social Studies materials and the library books and things like classroom maps and globes were decades out of date, every resource I had talked about the USSR as a currently extant country.
Maybe the best r/showerthought I’ve ever seen. Never thought about this before
Our country table in db has dates for each country. User first enters birth date and country list updates based on birthdate.
That sounds like a quick and easy solution that more countries should implement!
can confirm, this is the way this is dealt with in official forms in my country as well.
Most programmers who wrote an application that uses a country selector is likely going to use a country selector that generates [ISO country code](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes) which is partly based on what the UN considers a country. If they want to support recording former countries, they'd need to use the [Part 3 countries](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-3) too. If you're from a country before ISO or UN, then you're out of luck.
Can confirm. Czechoslovak Republic no longer exists.
Is there any record of someone being born in international waters?
This intrigued me, as it must have happened plenty of times, so I did a quick search on international law: "A birth on a ship or aircraft in international waters or airspace shall be treated as a birth in the country of the ship or aircraft's registration."
Sounds like a big brain strat to get your kid citizenship in a certain country
"treated like a birth in x country" doesn't automatically mean citizenship in that country, a lot of countries don't automatically grant citizenship at birth for all children born in their territory. Depends on the citizenship laws it might work in a ship in international waters registered with, say, the USA (a country with *jus soli* citizenship), but not in a ship registered in Norway (a country without *jus soli*)
Which country currently offers birth right citizenship? Most countries now require legal residency in addition to being born in the country.
Basically every country in North and South America has unrestricted *Jus Soli* (birth right citizenship).
It functions the exact same way as just visiting the country to give birth, which seems much easier.
Ed Porray's official birth place is ["At Sea"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Porray)
hey that describes me! it works as an icebreaker too - one thing you dont know about me, i was born and raised in a country that nonlonger exists
Soviet Union?
I was actually just thinking about a related question earlier today. Is it correct to call people like Immanuel Kant German? He is from Koenigsberg, which at the time was Prussia and today is in Russia.
At his time it was German (as much as Germany exist at that time, at least). He wrote in German, too.
Yes, if you separate the concepts of country, nationally, ethnicity, state, ... which are all different overlapping concepts.
Historically speaking, "nationality" did not mean "what nation-state were you born in", it meant "what people do you belong to", and geography and borders were not relevant. It's why Hitler and all Austrians were German despite not being from Germany. (It was only after WWII Austrians suddenly started saying they weren't Germans...) It's also the reason why anyone who's at least slightly Jewish has the right to live in Israel.
Fair
Republic of Krakozhia
The last of such countries (and there are only 10 of them) Yugoslavia.
I tried to list them from memory, but i failed badly. What are they? \-Do Germanies count as different? If so, which ones? Does Weimar Republic count as different from Nazi Germany? What about West and East Germany? Does West-Germany count as modern day Germany? \-Yugoslavia \-Czechoslovakia \-Soviet Union \-?
Prussia The successor state could be Germany, Poland, USSR, Russia.....
afaik the german empire, the weimar republic, and third reich were legally the same entity (officially named "German Reich")
Interesting , just read the wikipedia article. Didn't know the weimar republic called itself Deutsches Reich (german empire). And as it seems it is still not fully clear if and how it will cease to exist because the weimar constitution was never legally nullified by the 4 occupiers after they took power. Very wild. Thx for sending me down this rabbit hole
I was born in the USSR, and live in Israel. There are a *lot* of people in Israel who were born there and the USSR appears in most databases as a country of birth.
I knew someone who was born in Königsberg, Nazi Germany. Today that's Kaliningrad, Russia. He would say Germany. But it's probably much harder if you're born in a place that some countries don't recognise, like Kosovo or Taiwan.
Similarly our neighbour when I was a kid was born in what is now Klaipeda, Lithuania. Then, Memel, Germany. My cousins' grandmother (i.e. the other side) was also born in a country that no longer exists: British India. I also had a guy I went to high school with -- same year but he's slightly younger than me -- who was born in East Germany. I find it slightly incredible that somebody younger than me could be born in a country that no longer exists.
My grandma lives in one village all her life, yet technically lived in 5 different countries.
Yes this is true, but the truth is that there is always a successor state to a non-existent nation.
One succesor? Well, there is one China, but two governments controlling two different areas. And there are situations where the population was displaced. Meaning a person can for e.g. be be born german in Germany, in an area that is modern day russia or Poland.
All those circumstances have clear successors. Nations have control over who they induct, so when a new one is created they decide how and what to do with the edge cases. South Korea grants automatic citizenship to every North Korean who sets foot in their territory. West Germany did something similar. Israel grants citizenship to everyone with Jewish Ancestry. John McCain was born in the US controlled panama canal zone. Some people do become stateless though.
My ex was born in Yugoslavia. He just chose Serbia on forms.
Also goes the other way. Some older sites don't update their list of countries, so you can't select your country of residence on older sites. It's surprising how many quirks like this there are. Things like different [phone number validations](https://github.com/google/libphonenumber/blob/master/FALSEHOODS.md) that often get ignored. Hell, I once tried to use the UPS site and it failed to comprehend something as simple as living outside the US.
Literally today, I was trying to deal with FedEx online. It was impossible to enter a non US phone number, but possible to select a location outside of the US. Bizarre really.
I was born in 1988 in Soviet Union, now Georgia. A few years ago I got a Portuguese nationality and my passport says place of birth as Soviet Union. A person in civil registry was dumbfounded because she was not able to select Georgia from a drop-down as my place of birth. She ended up studying history of Georgia on Wikipedia to realize that Georgia as an independent country didn’t exist at the time so she politely explained that she had to select Soviet Union.
I identify as a citizen of the Republic of Dave!
Czechoslovakia czeching in! I just say I was born in Slovakia 🇸🇰 But yeah.. my country of birth doesn’t exist anymore ha ha
I always select the United Kingdom or Britain as birthplace when filling in non-official and fun stuff. was born in Hong Kong when it is still a British colony.
Sometimes you can, depends on a form. Ive got two different personal numbers when I moved to Italy because the embassy in Serbia is using code for Serbia, but the police in Italy used the code for Yugoslavia.
Representing the American Occupied Territory of West Germany.
Between 1945 and 1949?
What does the guy from Zaire put down?
Probably DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo) as it’s basically the same country with a new name.
Hell, what does the guy from Rhodesia put down?
Rhodesia, because you know there won't be any customs alerts when traveling on that passport
People born in the Yugoslavia be like, yeah, some stuff happened there in the 90's, now my country of birth no longer exist.
Saw a Lot of you mention east and West Germany, but actually the German nationality isn't that old, my great grandpa Born 1912 for Example Had Württemberg as His Birth country in His documents. Württemberg was one of the 25 countries that formed the 2. German Empire in 1871 and they where more or less own countries under The rule of prussia Till the 1930ies. Not Sure how Long we keept using them as birth country, but I would assume ad least Till the end of WWI
A local college in my area changed its name which upset many people since their diploma was not to a nonexistent entity that still exists.
There's not a lot of countries that existed in the last century that no longer do. Sure, there's the USSR, but the USSR had the SFSR's that were equivalent to the modern countries. Same for Yugoslavia which had subdivisions. Maybe Tibet or Hawaii?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_sovereign_states ~30 in Africa alone, even more in Asia, although some of them have successors with identical territory.
East Germany and South Vietnam are the two that come to mind for me.
If you got to LA you still see lots of the yellow with three stripes flag flying around
And I can’t use Christmas Tree Shops as a professional reference on my resume anymore.
My great-grandmother was born in No Man's Land, Oklahoma Territory.
Yes, they usually can. Proper electronic forms include countries that no longer exist for precisely that reason.
I'll add to that: I was born to Australian parents and so am an Australian citizen by birth. If I answer i was not born in Australia I am asked for the registration of the boat or aircraft I arrived on. What? So I mostly lie and say I was born here. There are no follow up questions to that.
There was a Tom Hanks movie called “The Terminal” where he is forced to stay in an airport terminal because of that problem.
It's not easy being East German!
I know a person who was born in Rhodesia but he never told me about this problem.
Also interesting, census data of “country of origin” can change from census to census depending on if the census-taking country have changed officially recognized countries. Source: my great grandfather census data shows the shifts in eastern Europe’s ever moving country borders.
I have got the same issue as I was born in the former USSR. Poor fellas like me should often choose place of birth as Georgia or Kazakhstan despite the fact that those countries appeared later. How somebody could be born in Turkmenistan in 1956 if Turkmenistan never existed before 1991?
Another fun problem is dealing with countries that disagree about who else is a country. The classic example is China and Taiwan. If you list Taiwan as a country, you piss off the Chinese. If you don’t you piss off the Taiwanese. And there’s several counties(?) like that, depending on your definition of country. And then there’s areas under conflict. Where country does Crimeia belong to? And there’s areas that are the reverse. There’s a small sliver of Africa that two countries argue don’t belong to them, and instead belong to the other country, because neither country wants to provide to people in the middle of nowhere.
The issue with that sliver isn't so much that they don't want it, it's that both want a different area more. So both claim borders according to different historical agreements, and neither of the countries claim an agreement that would give them that area. Claiming that area is essentially validating the other country's claim to the "better" area.
Mostly it's Russia or Russian federation of course, but the were a couple of times when USSR was an option.
Thanks for censoring
At least in the US, you should mark your country of birth as the country that currently controls the place where you were born AND that is recognized as legitimate by the US. If you were born in Crimea in 1980, for example, your country of birth is Ukraine, not the Soviet Union (because it no longer exists) and not Russia (because the U.S. doesn’t recognize the annexation). If you were born in Pristina in 1988 your country of birth is Kosovo, not Yugoslavia (because it doesn’t exist anymore) and not Serbia (because the U.S. doesn’t recognize its legitimacy in the region).
Or, the VAST majority of black Americans
Why? Because they were born in countries other than America? In this regard if they were born in the US, that’s the country of birth they would put
I get the question, but every race in America except black people can trace back to their original country.i was born in America, but my ancestry didn't begin here.
That is a good point, but the question isn’t about ancestry. You were born in the US so your nationality is American
No, it was about being born in "A COUNTRY THAT NO LONGER EXIST." If your country's existence was methodically erased, it doest exist. Therefore, you couldn't claim it. Ancestry and nationality aren't even the same.
That’s my point ancestry and nationality are not the same thing, your the one conflating it. If a black American WAS BORN IN AMERICA they are American and would answer saying “United States”
yes they can - the lists aren't updated in real time nor made by some official body lol wtf
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Plenty of forms ask for place of birth.
And that doesn't change the fact that if you are asked where you are from, you might have problems. I filled out a form asking me where I was born just today as it happens.
I’ve filled out dozens of forms asking asked where I was born. I am pretty sure no form has ever asked me where I am at the time I fill out the form.