Plаintiff-Appellant Randolph Porter, a naturalized United States citizen, sought a
BACKGROUND
Porter’s brother died on Pan Am Flight 103, which was destroyed over Lockerbie, Scotland by Libyan terrorists on December 21, 1988. Under a settlement reached between the United States and Libya, Porter may have been entitled to compensation for his brother’s death if he could show that he, Porter, was a U.S. citizen at the time of the Lockerbie bombing. See Libyan Claims Resolution Act, Pub. L. No. 110-301, 122 Stat. 2999 (2008); Decision No. LIB-I-001, at 5-6 (Foreign Claims Settlement Commission 2009) (limiting compensation to claimants who were United States nationals “at the time of loss” (internal quotation marks omitted)), available at http://www.justice.gov/fcsc/ readingroom/lib-i-001 .pdf.
Porter was born in St. Vincеnt in 1955 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1995. He argued to the USCIS in 2011, however, that he was entitled to derivative U.S. citizenship as of the time of his birth because his mother Mary Diamond was a U.S. citizen (as a consequence of having been born in this cоuntry) and had been present here for at least one continuous year before relocating to St. Vincent. See 8 U.S.C. § 1409(c) (1952) (establishing requirements for derivative citizenship). 1 Whether Porter, with derivative citizenship, would be eligible to claim from the settlеment fund is not at issue in this litigation. The USCIS denied Porter a certificate of citizenship, and Porter sued in district court seeking a declaratory judgment pursuant to 8 U.S.C. § 1503(a) and 28 U.S.C. § 2201(a) that he was a citizen at birth.
Porter relied on several affidavits to support his claim. One of these affidavits, submitted by his mother, Mary Diamond, stated that she was born in Brooklyn in 1929 and moved to St. Vincent in 1930 when she was “between one year old and two years old.” App. 136. Diamond’s
The parties cross-moved for summary judgment. The district court ruled that the affidavits submitted by Porter were inadmissible hearsay assertions, not subject to the personal or family history exceptions in Rules 803(19) and 804(b)(4). The court reasoned that Diamond’s statement concerning her age at relocation (as opposed to the fact of relocation) and her reputation for being a certain age at relocation were not inherently reliable enough to fall within those exceptions. The court then held that Porter had failed to prove that his mother had been present in the United States for at least one year before his birth, as required by § 1409(с), and that, consequently, he was not entitled to derivative citizenship. The court granted the government’s motion, and this appeal followed.
DISCUSSION
When a party challenges a district court’s evidentiary rulings underlying a grant of summary judgment, we undertake a two-step inquiry. First, “we review the trial court’s evidentiary rulings, which define the summary judgment record.”
LaSalle Bank Nat’l Ass’n v. Nomura
Asset
Capital Corp.,
Hearsay is any out-of-court statement offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted in the statement. See Fed. R.Evid. 801(c). Rule 802 provides that hearsay is inadmissible unless made admissible by a federal statute, the Federal Rules of Evidence, or other rules prescribed by the Supreme Court.
Porter contends that his mother’s declaration satisfies the hearsay exception permitting admission of certain statements “of personal or family history” when the de
Diamond’s sworn statement— “[wjhen I was between one year old and two years old, I moved to St. Vincent and the Grenadines” — does not relate to her “birth, adoption, legitimacy, ancestry, marriage, divorce, [or] relationship by blood, adoption, or marriage.” Instead, Porter argues that his mother’s age at the time of her relocation from the United States is a “similar fact[ ] of personal or family history,” within the meaning of Rule 804(b)(4)(A). We disagree.
The exception for statements of family history, like the other exceptions to the hearsay rule, is premised on the view that certain categories of statements are “ ‘free enough from the risk of inaccuracy and untrustworthiness’ ” such that “the test of cross-examinatiоn would be of marginal utility.”
Idaho v. Wright,
Neither the Rules nor the Advisory Committee Notes define the scope of “similar facts of personal or family history,” but the Supreme Court has instructed that “absent express provisions to the contrary,” we may presume that the drafters of the Rules intended to “adhere to the common law in the application of evidentiary principles.”
Tome v. United States,
The Diamond affidavit does not meet this test. The affidavit fails satisfactorily to explain how the precise date of relocation was sufficiently significant or interesting or unusual such that it ever beсame— much less remained for more than eighty years' — a subject of presumptively accurate family lore. The affidavit was offered not simply to prove that Diamond left the United States at an early age. The affidavit was offerеd to prove many years after the event a very narrow range of dates for her travel — a range about which she, because of her age, lacked personal knowledge. We do not believe that family members would ordinarily bе so interested in Mary’s exact age at relocation as to afford Diamond’s imprecisely described but definitely bounded statement the level of inherent reliability required by Rule 804. In other words, although a change in one’s country of residenсe or in one’s citizenship might, like the date of one’s birth, death,
Porter asserts that the other affidavits satisfy the parallel exception for statements about “reputation concerning personal or family history,” a hearsay exception for which the declarant’s availability is immaterial. Fed.R.Evid. 808(19). This provision exempts from the hearsay rule statements concerning a “reputation among a person’s family by blood, adoption, or marriage — or among a person’s associates or in the community — concerning the person’s birth, adoption, legitimacy, ancestry, marriage, divorce, death, relationship by blood, adoption, or marriage, or similar facts of personal or family history.” Id. (emphasis added). Statements are sufficiently trustworthy, and thus satisfy this exception, “when the topic is such that the facts are likely to have been inquired about and that persons having personal knowledge have disclosed facts which have thus been discussed in the community.” Fed.R.Evid. 803(19)-(21) advisory committee’s note.
For the same reasons as those discussed above, we conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion by ruling that statements of Diamond’s family members and friend, concerning Diamond’s precise age at relocation, were inadmissible hearsay. We see no reason for concluding that, without more, a statement about a child’s age — precise to a range of months as to a time of relocation more than eighty years ago — is as inherently reliable as the types of statements that Rule 803 permits. See 5 Jack B. Weinstein & Margaret A. Berger, Weinstein’s Federal Evidence § 803.21[1], p. 803-140 (J. McLaughlin ed., 2013) (“[A] false reputation as to birth, death, or marriage is not likely to arise at any time. However, there is a greater possibility of inaccuracy concerning other aspects of family history, such as an ancestor’s travels.”). Because Porter submitted no sufficient admissible evidence establishing his mother’s age at relocation, we conclude that the district court correctly determined that Porter was not entitled to dеrivative citizenship.
CONCLUSION
The judgment of the district court is AFFIRMED.
Notes
. ''[T]he applicable law for transmitting citizenship to a child born abroad when one parent is a United States citizen is the statute that was in effect at the time of the child's birth.”
Drozd v. INS,
. The parties agree that, because Mary Diamond passed away after this litigation began, she is "unavailable” for purposes of Rule 804. See Fed.R.Evid. 804(a)(4).