Background
The Circuit Court was one of several courts with power to naturalize an individual. Other courts located within the boundaries of St. Clair County, and their indexes, are discussed on the Society's primary naturalization page. Sample declarations, petitions, and certificates of arrival are also shown there.

The index below covers Volumes 1, 2, and part of 3, 1906–15 July 1918. Additional indexes from the remaining 19 volumes will be posted as these become available. The Office of the Circuit Clerk, courthouse in Belleville holds the originals. All volumes were microfilmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah and placed in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. Each reel contains images of one or more Volumes (bound papers). The eight (8) reels available cover 1906–1945 . Volumes 1, 2, and part of 3 are represented below.

Photocopies and Microfilm Available Three Ways
1. Microfilm referenced below is available on loan to a local Family History Center (FHC) near you. Determine the location of your FHC by following the link to FamilySearch.org, then click "Library" on the FHL menu bar, then Family History Centers.

2. The O'Fallon, Illinois, Family History Center has a set of this microfilm on permanent loan, courtesy of Jim Moore. Phone this Center for hours of operation (618) 632.0210. Visit in person to make photocopies on your own on paper, flash, or thumb drive.

3. Visit the Office of the Circuit Clerk, courthouse at Belleville. However, on site guides to specific microfilm reels are not labeled by court, so are cumbersome to use because location indexes do not name the specific court for each segment of the reel. The microfilm reels may be searched on site. Use the courthouse site for research only after other court searches are negative. The Office of the Circuit Clerk retained a number of original declarations, petitions, and final oaths, all in manuscript form, and most dating from the 1920s-forward. These are in the Felony Division of this office (2010), but accessible on microfilm.

Certificate Of Arrival – Careful Interpretation Warranted
A "Certificate Of Arrival" generated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) may be among microfilmed documents. Aliens who arrived in the U.S. after 29 June 1906 were subject to this additional naturalization step which required their immigration record be verified. All certificates are typewritten, not all certificates of arrival were preserved by all courts.

The title of the document has frequently led to misunderstanding, causing some to state that certificates of arrival were issued to immigrants upon their arrival in the U.S. This was not the case. This, and the following from Loretto Szucs and Sandra Luebking, editors, The Source: A Guidebook to American Genealogy, 3rd ed. (Provo, Utah: Ancestry, 2006), p. 403.

• First, the immigrant applied for naturalization, sometimes five or more years after entry.
• Next, federal naturalization officials had to verify the immigrant's lawful admission to the country with his official immigration record, usually a ship passenger list.
• Once the immigration record was located, arrival information was certified on a form called a Certificate of Arrival.
• The certificate was then forwarded by federal naturalization officials to the court where the immigrant had applied for citizenship. The certificate served as proof of the immigrant's eligibility to naturalize.

Petitions Denied
If naturalization was denied, the reason will appear on the Petition. Some Petitions were rejected for what today might be viewed as trivial reasons, e.g., keeping a saloon or bar, usually in tandem with breach of laws restricting location, liquor sales, or hours of operation. Others were denied citizenship if they previously claimed an exemption from military service during World War I because they were not yet citizens of the United States. See, for example, "Men Who Claimed Exemption Do Not Get Papers," Daily Advocate (Belleville, Ill.) 10 January 1921, p. 1.

Enemy Alien Registration – Careful Interpretation Warranted
When the U.S. was at war with another country, immigrants from that country then living in the U.S. — and who were not yet naturalized — were classified as "enemy aliens." [In other words, the individual was an alien whose former country of allegiance was then an enemy.] The largest effort to register "enemy" aliens was conducted by the Department of Justice during World War I. In the 1920s, Congress subsequently granted authority to destroy the WWI "enemy alien" records. Consequently, a very small number survive today. Similar procedures applied during World War II. From The Source: A Guidebook to American Genealogy, 3rd ed., p. 410.

Circuit Court – Special Sessions Held in East St. Louis
* An important find in this record collection is that all the Volume 3 document sets were filed in St Clair County Circuit Court convened in East St Louis, not Belleville, presumably because of the sheer number of residents there and for their convenience. The Volume 3 record set begins with Petition no. 401 (dated 26 Jan 1915), and ends with no. 650 (dated 15 Jul 1918).

Sample illustrations of the Declaration, Certificate of Arrival, and Petition, may be found on the Society's primary naturalization page.

About this Index and Surname Variations
Each Volume may include one or more of the following documents filed by an individual to become a citizen: 1. Declarations, 2. Petitions, 3. Certificates of Arrival.

Surnames may be spelled several different ways on the documents for any one individual between that shown on the certificate of arrival, and the oath. The index below shows

• Exact spelling of the surname on each document.
  
• Alternative spellings, shown within square brackets, [   name   ]. Bracketed spellings are those proposed by the transcriptionist when handwritten surnames were difficult to interpret.

The FHL reel number shown below refers to the microfilm reel number which holds the original index.

Documents follow each index, usually on the next reel:
FHL 2188876 contains Vol. I documents
FHL 2188877 contains Vol. II documents
FHL 2188878 contains Vol. III documents.

The Document Number: For Volumes 2 and 3, the document number is keyed to the stamped number found on Petitions, and is the same as shown below. The original index to Volume 1 shown on the microfilm was inconsistent, so a new index was created for this webpage, and is keyed to the handwritten number on the Petition. If unable to locate the document by handwritten number, try matching the page number indexed below to a document's stamped number.