We have been working on it for about six months. Unfortunately, we didn’t know about it before then. We do also have dual US-UK citizenship available to us, which I stupidly have not taken advantage of making official until about then too.
Here’s the very weird situation in my family if you’re curious. My great-grandfather was English but married a German woman and they lived in Berlin, where my grandfather was born. He married my Grandmother, who was English, and they lived in London, where my father was born. My grandfather became a British subject and you have to renounce your German citizenship if you gain citizenship elsewhere. However, he did so several years after my father, who then emigrated here to the U.S., was born, making my father a de facto German citizen, which would, if we get all the papers together and get through the German bureaucracy, make he and I and my daughter German citizens based on the shit ton of research my brother has done.
We’re both unhappy and happy that my father never knew, because he was both Jewish and grew up in London during the Blitz, so he wasn’t especially fond of Germans, an unfortunate bigotry he carried to his death (he excepted German Jews because “the Nazis didn’t consider them German.”) and if he found out he was German, it would have killed him. Or at least he would have ranted about it non-stop for about three years and none of us wanted to deal with that shit. On the other hand, it would have made this whole thing so much easier.