Client story
How the situation developed
Where they started
Viktor knew about his Hungarian ancestry but ran into the worst scenario in descent matters: the key record of his ancestor officially did not exist. The document had been destroyed in the war or lost as borders shifted repeatedly - the history of that region is full of such gaps.
Why the standard route did not work
The ordinary ancestry procedure rests on a direct record: here is the ancestor’s birth document, here is the line to the applicant. When the central generation appears in no register at all, the direct route is closed - there is nothing to prove it with, because the paper does not exist in principle.
What BRIDGES had to solve
But the absence of a record does not mean the fact never happened. The person lived, was born, had relatives - and that is reflected indirectly: in censuses, parish books, documents of neighbouring events, mentions in relatives’ files. From those traces a fact can be assembled and established through a court.
Why a standard answer would not do
Viktor came to BRIDGES understanding that his case was not one for a conveyor belt: the task was not to find a non-existent paper but to prove the fact indirectly and fix it with a court decision.
I was told that without a record of my ancestor the ancestry could not be proved - and the record simply does not exist, it was destroyed. I thought that was a final dead end. Sergey and his team took a different route: they gathered indirect evidence in the archives and established the fact itself through a court. The court decision replaced the missing record. After that I received my EU passport.
