It asks for your date of birth.

It asks where you were born.

It asks for both of your parents’ full names, including your mother’s name before she was married.

I sat on a plastic chair in a county office in Saint Paul and learned, off a form, that my husband’s mother was called Ingeborg Vestby and that he had been born in Duluth in 1953.

And it asks for your address.

Walter wrote down an address on Currie Avenue, which is a shelter, and which is the address he had been using for mail for about two years, and the clerk did not blink at it, because clerks in that office see it constantly and it is a perfectly ordinary thing to write.