Home Office: Aliens Department: General (GEN) Files and Aliens' Naturalization and...

Policy files relating to the definition of British and foreign nationality, naturalisations, immigration, refugees, internees and prisoners of war, the employment of foreign labour, deportation, the status of citizens of the Irish Republic, and related subjects. There are also papers relating to departmental committees, statistics, conferences, conventions and treaties on these subjects.

The papers in this series are arranged by departmental file number within blocks of transfers. The inclusion of a date before a file number (as in GEN (1963)1/7/1) indicates the year in which the file is supposed to have been created, but often it only indicates the year in which the first subfile was raised on a particular subject.

Although the GEN symbol only has been used in the list for the departmental reference the files in this series also include ALN and NTY symbols. The GEN Series began in the 1930s as "Aliens General". In the late 1940s it was decided to treat "immigration" and "nationality" separately and ALN and NTY began to be substituted for GEN, both by "re-registering" existing files and also on new continuations of existing files. However GEN files also continued to be created during this later period. The significant elements of the file reference are the numbers, which remained constant throughout the entire series, rather than the prefixes.

Records of the Appellate Authority are in

• Home Office, Aliens Department (B Department), 1913-1962
• Home Office, Immigration and Nationality Department, 1962-1962

From 1980 Home Office

Topics

Refugees

Internment

Labour

Migration

Treaties and alliances

Ireland

Nationality