My Croatian great-grandparents and the gift of dual citizenship.
After 15 trips to the Gunnison County vital records office, I sent 56 birth, marriage, and death certificates to the Colorado Secretary of State to be duly apostilled for international use. The patient staff in Gunnison had corrected name spellings, data, and places on old documents and ensured that copies of handwritten records were legible. All of this in pursuit of proving my family’s direct lineage to our Croatian great-grandparents, Juraj “George” Sneller and Francisca “Frances” Sneller, of Crested Butte and, formerly, Croatia. The documents would become the backbone of our dual citizenship applications.
Dual citizenship has been a family dream long in the making. In 2014, my brother Mike and I made a run at Italian dual citizenship via our Crested Butte grandparents on the Guerrieri side, but we ran into roadblocks. We gave up because the exact dates of their naturalization were difficult to establish, and because of a requirement that our dad, then in his 80s, travel to the Italian consulate in Chicago. Years went by, and we still fantasized about the benefits dual citizenship would bring to the family in terms of work, travel, residency, and education.
When the subject came up again in 2024, my son Henry asked, “Why not our Croatian side?” Our Croatian heritage was part of my life throughout my childhood. My grandma’s Croatian Fraternal newspaper was delivered to our house each month, with its strange words and punctuation. Although Grandma wasn’t one for storytelling about the “old country,” she certainly cooked her heritage. Each Christmas, she’d make povitica nutbread along with kifilce almond crescent cookies, hurmešice date cookies, and linzer keksići jam-filled cookies. Her Croatian gulas was a favorite all year round, and to us, the polka dances we attended in Almont and Crested Butte were Croatian.
When we looked into dual citizenship, we were encouraged to find out that Croatia had recently eliminated the requirement that dual citizens speak, write, and read Croatian. We spent the next many months researching, hiring a Croatian attorney, and with 21 family members willing to share the work, found enough courage to dive in. We knew that George came to Crested Butte around 1893, and though they were married back in Croatia, Frances didn’t join George in America for another ten years, when she arrived with their 11-year-old son, Anton. Although we couldn’t find George on any ship manifests or U.S. entry paperwork, we did find information on Frances and Anton, and because of that paperwork, Frances became the focus of our citizenship applications.
I’d been aware that I was born on the same day, October 26, as Frances. Still, it wasn’t until I saw her 1873 birth and baptismal record, written in beautiful church calligraphy, that I began to wonder, “Who was this woman whose birthday I share, whose heritage I claim?”
There’s no doubt she was brave, like all immigrants. She and young Anton arrived at Ellis Island in 1903, speaking no English and carrying just ten dollars in cash with which to make their way the nearly two thousand miles to Crested Butte, where they joined George and a growing Croatian immigrant community.
By 1920, the census showed 1,213 people living in Crested Butte, and an estimated 500 of them were Croats, likely a larger population than in Denver at that time. Along with other “South Balkan Slavs” (including Italians and Slovenians), Croatians were the most prominent and most influential immigrant group in Crested Butte. Current Croatian place names and businesses in town are a testament to that influence: the Verzuh Ranch preserve, the Kochevars Saloon on Elk Avenue, The Slogar restaurant, and Tony’s (Mihelich) Conoco — now the Crested Butte Museum.
The Sneller name doesn’t pop up in place names in modern-day Crested Butte, but Frances, George, and their children do appear on the Crested Butte Croatian Hall member ledgers from the early days until well into the mid-1970s. Croatian Hall, now a hotel and spa, was once relied upon by Croatian miners and their families not just for socialization, but also for sick benefits, burials, and prayers.
George worked in the local coal mines for decades. With his meager wages, he and Frances raised six children and saved enough money to buy their house at 117 Whiterock Avenue, where they lived the rest of their lives, as did their son Tom. My sharp 94-year-old Italian dad, Richard Guerrieri, grew up just down the street from them and says that even though he spoke only English and they spoke only Croatian, “Somehow we managed to get along and understand each other.”
Several months into our dual citizenship project, I asked him, “Since I share Grandma Sneller’s birthday, do you think I’m the reincarnation of her?” It was an odd question for our family, who aren’t into woo-woo stuff like reincarnation, so I wasn’t too surprised when Dad didn’t answer for a long time. But the pause went on for so long that I wondered if the phone connection had gone bad.
“It’s okay if the answer is no,” I said, letting him off the hook.
There came another long pause before he said, “Well, you do seem a lot like her. When she was in her prime as a young woman, she would set her mind to something or other, and she was damn dedicated. You should have seen her when they butchered animals in the backyard of their house on Whiterock. She was the boss, and everybody knew it. Not just with the butchering, but any other family activity for that matter. Picnics, cooking, you name it, she ruled the roost. Sound familiar?”
I laughed, knowing he’d thought out the answer so I wouldn’t take offense. “Do I look like her, too?” I asked him. “All the Snellers were tall, raw-boned people. You remember some of them. Even the women were big. I figure you got your height from the Snellers.”
That afternoon, I hunted through family photos to see if I looked like Grandma Sneller in any other way. In one photo, she stands in the middle of a dirt street in Crested Butte next to George and her young son, Tom. She’s nearly the same height as George, her round cheeks are shiny, and she’s smiling. I imagine her as a joyful mother, an optimistic bride, an enthusiastic new American. It’s the only photo of her with a smile — in the rest, she looks intent, focused, and serious.
I study her face in the serious photos, trying to see myself in her. Failing that, I try to read meaning in her eyes, and I decide she’s looking straight at me and all the generations to come, but mostly at me, telling me to stand strong, live well, be brave. Moments later, common sense prevails, and I see the look of an overworked woman getting through a day at a time, one who has better things to do than stare at a camera. Either way, she is my square-shouldered, determined-looking great-grandmother who gave me the gift of life in America and now, over a century later and against many odds, also a shot at dual citizenship. How surprised I think she’d be that three, four, and five generations later, her heirs would be reclaiming their Croatian heritage. I imagine she’d also be proud of this extended family, of her legacy, and of the now-independent nation of Croatia.
In a couple of months, my brothers, sister, nieces, nephews, children, grandchildren, spouses, and I will bring our multitude of certified-notarized-apostilled-translated documents — in English and in Croatian — to consulate meetings in New York, Chicago, and Seattle, where they’ll be scrutinized for accuracy and lineage. Then we’ll wait months or maybe years until the Croatian government processes our paperwork.
Whether or not our applications are approved, this project has bonded us to our Sneller relatives and to our Croatian heritage in surprising ways. These days, I think of Grandma Sneller, knowing that my dogged determination is also hers, and that with every step I take, it is her tall genes that carry me forward. If I gain Croatian citizenship or if I don’t, I am, like her, not just from Gunnison County, Colorado, but a part of me is also from the small town of Kuti, Brod Moravice, Croatia. I couldn’t be prouder.