Mr. Storer to Mr. Sherman.

No. 24.]

Sir: I have the honor to request instructions for issuing a passport under the following circumstances:

A person representing himself to be Elea Luboschey presents to-day passport No. 6410, purporting to be issued by the State Department January 6, 1894, evidently stamped and not signed “W. Q. Gresham.”

The personage presenting it is correctly described in the passport, and states that he is a child of a man who was a naturalized citizen of the United States while his son was under the age of 21 and living in Chicago. He has no proof, except his possession of the passport, and his resemblance to the description, that he is the person named therein, and the passport itself is in very bad condition.

He can not supply any of the information called for in the affidavit set out in form No. 178, as he does not know the year of his father’s naturalization or the date when his father emigrated from Russia. As the passport was visaed April 14, 1894, by the consul-general at Berlin, and as his description is accurate, I should have given him a new one had it been within the two years. His appearance, his birthplace (Russia), and his own statement that he has been in Siberia and recently came from Spain led me to decline to issue a passport to him unless the records in the State Department under passport No. 6410 show that at that time he was able to give a satisfactory account of the naturalization of his father and his own identity.

If the Department will inform me whether the records there show this fact and that in consequence I am authorized to issue him a passport on taking up the old one, I shall act accordingly.

I have, etc.,

Bellamy Storer.