When Lisa DeNatale set out to obtain Italian citizenship based on her Sicilian lineage, things got complicated fast. Non-Italians can obtain citizenship if an ancestor was born in Italy, even one as far back as great-great-grandparents. DeNatale's paternal grandparents, for instance, were born in Sicily and came over to the U.S. in the early 1900s.

But the rules for proving that connection are byzantine. Would-be Italians must track down birth, death and marriage certificates that might have been recorded on paper decades or even a century ago, and disqualifying exceptions abound.