I'm pretty sure I've gotten a passport in the USA before and never had to provide any of that information. Is this something new?
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2026
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Struggled a bit because my grandparents raised me and they're dead. Not sure all that has to be prefect though. Divorce dates for example, how are they gonna check, call all 50 states and request records? If I can't readily determine where my grandparents were born, how would the federal government know?
Anyway, this isn't new, and certainly not a Trump thing because I applied before Biden was out.
It's not an automatic denial either though. You can N/A those sections if you don't have the information. They may ask you to fill out an extra form but if you're an adult they may also just accept it if everything else is okay. What you shouldn't do is lie on the form. So don't N/A something where you do have the information.
I was hoping that would be the case, but everything I googled said "if you cant reach out to your ex-spouse, no problem, just get the info from their friends or family!" Like, thanks, anyone close enough to him to know that info hates my guts and will definitely tell him and give him my contact info.
Also, if you're old like me (40+), your parents middle initials might not be on your birth certificate and they won't accept it. You'll have to go through getting a new birth certificate beforehand and run all around the city waiting in lines for an entire day. Ask me how I know.
My father was given a middle name at birth, which he changed when he got his Social Security card. I've already had a bit of legal difficulty with that one.
Just don't go to the US.
This is about people in the US being able to go to other countries.
Shouldn’t be allowed.
You're in a UK instance. If Americans shouldn't be allowed to travel abroad, the neither should British people.
Wish I didn't have to, but unfortunately I was born here :/
Hahaha tough luck my friend
From an outsider's perspective, I think the USA and Russia should just have sex and get it over with.
We get it - you both love the military, you both hate minorities, you both want to restrict the rights and freedoms of your citizens.
Just get a room, get it out of your systems, and maybe the rest of the world can finally get some much-needed peace this year.
In fairness, there is a non-zero chance Trump has sucked off Putin already.
Nope.
We just want Greenland sex.
For some reason.
All that melting permafrost is revealing places that haven't been used for sex in a very long time - practically Virgin territory, if you will, and we all know how the control freaks love ruining virgins.
Well, the Greenland thing is certainly barely legal...
So yea, passports.
Is this new? When I filed for my passport in ~2021 I didn't need that info.
It is not. Those questions have been on the DS-11 since before 2021.
I don't recall answering any of those questions since I got my passport in the 2000s.
I just checked and they were definitely on the passport application in the 2000’s.
No, it’s confabulated nonsense.
No, they’re legitimate questions on the form you have to fill out for a passport in the United States.
Yeah, I’m from the US and I have a passport and no idea where my dad was born.
Isn't this due to the US not having a working census database?
Please correct me if I am wrong.
From what I have heard, you need to bring bills with your address to prove where you live in some circumstances in the US.
Here in Sweden, or any sane country, I simply use my personal number to identify myself, and bam, the requesting entity can find the info they need.
Americans are not fans of centralized information on the population. It doesn't help that the corporate equivalent to Voldemort is trying to sell it as a means of "law and order". Something every American understands is meant to screw with us. Literally every time we give the government a new database they abuse it. The most recent is connecting a medical database to immigration enforcement.
So yeah. If we could stop electing people under the motto, "The Cruelty Is The Point", then we could have nice things.
The US is not only quit populous, our huge footprint and lack of government centralization causes a lot of stupid shit like using bills for proof of residence. Imagine tying 100s of thousands of databases together so the federal government can pull all info on a citizen.
BTW, this is exactly what Palantir is accomplishing and we should be screaming about it.
My wife had to sent utility bills with her name and our address on it to immigration to prove she didn't marry for the green card and we're actually living together. And don't start me on our immigration system, totally and purposefully broken.
As an American/Swedish dual citizen...
I think I've only had to show mail to prove my address when first getting a driver license in a new state. So that's a thing yes, but not very common.
Unlike in Sweden, in the US you don't register/update your address with the authorities when you move. It's not that the US doesn't have a "working database" for that -- it's just not a thing at all, there's no population register like in Sweden.
In Sweden you use your personnummer for identification, but you also have secure authentication methods like BankID that aren't available in the US. Your personnummer is public information and you'll provide it just about everywhere because there's little risk to you.
In the US we use our social security numbers for both identification and authentication. Because they're used for authentication, they're considered secret and we'll only share them when strictly required for necessary services (like government agencies and banks). This is obviously really poor security and they weren't originally intended to be used for authentication, but it is what it is.
Swedish system is of course more efficient and more secure.
I have to show my water bill to dump my monthly free truckload at the landfill, but that's about it. Sometimes utilities require it too.
Thank you for clarifying this!
The US badly needs a population database, however, I absolutely understand that with how the US government have abused and fooled their citizens in the past, there is a huge distrust of the government among Americans.
Yeah people won't even fill out the census. Last time it was done most of the people I worked with said they wouldn't fill it out.
Kind of
The vast majority of the time we use our social security numbers as a personal ID number. Drivers licenses also will have unique numbers on them which you can query off of, so too do passports.
By law, no one is required to have any of those three. People having a social security number is pretty common, but getting one of those is the easiest of the three.
Because none of them are a legal requirement to be a citizen, each one has multiple document set requirements, and if you have the other two, the third is trivial to obtain.
The documents you need if you're not leveraging another form of ID are basically a set of documents that aren't that difficult for your average person to get their own copies of but harder for some one else to forge and claim to be another person
The US government has the information, but there's no way for companies to sell you something if they used that data.
It's the same with US taxes. The IRS knows exactly how much you owe them each year. As a citizen, you cannot access that information. You have to fill out needlessly complicated forms to guess the correct amount of money to send them. If you guess wrong you can go to jail or be fined. To prevent this, you pay a company to fill out those forms. They don't get access to the correct number either, but you can buy insurance from them so they'll pay for your lawyer to defend you if you guess wrong.