> being a citizen if you have ancestors after 1904?
Prior to a 1914 change in the nationality law, a German citizen lost citizenship if they lived outside of Germany for more than 10 years and didn't file to retain citizenship. The general case is thus "after 1904."
Other common criteria are that the chain of citizenship is unbroken, that no parent naturalized elsewhere (also a loss of citizenship without permission to retain) prior to the child being born and no voluntary military service (with some exceptions for EU and NATO depending on year).
I see, that explains why I kept seeing 1914 when researching. I just thought OP might have made a typo in the year
I knew one of my great grandparents was born in Germany, but after some digging it turns out they emigrated as a toddler well before the cutoff, so no EU passport for me. I was surprised to learn that their family came over in multiple ships in the span of a few years. And also at how many dark patterns genealogy websites use to try to get you to pay!
Pro tip for anybody also interested: there are free sites for genealogy although their SEO is often poor, and they use clunky interfaces from like 15 years ago. Often operated by governments and perfectly capable of describing in words how to manually do a join, but incapable of automatically doing a join.
I found aad.archives.gov useful for Ellis Island records - if you search the manifest id from a record you can see the ship name, source, and year. And you can filter by last name + manifest id if you find what seems like partial data (the person you think is missing may have had their name recorded differently). There is some German emigration data also available but as you might expect it’s pretty patchy - nonetheless I was still able to find my great grandparent in their polity’s emigrant records.
Prior to a 1914 change in the nationality law, a German citizen lost citizenship if they lived outside of Germany for more than 10 years and didn't file to retain citizenship. The general case is thus "after 1904."
Other common criteria are that the chain of citizenship is unbroken, that no parent naturalized elsewhere (also a loss of citizenship without permission to retain) prior to the child being born and no voluntary military service (with some exceptions for EU and NATO depending on year).