My Thai wife gave birth to our daughter in the US 26 years ago.

We recently applied for, and received a Thai birth certificate for our daughter from the Thai consulate in LA

Here's a hypothetical question that came up in our family

If we had not applied for the certificate and my wife had died,

would our daughter still have been eligible to apply for a Thai birth certificate, say, 5 or 10 years later.

In other words, is the right to have a Thai birth certificate good for life as long as one parent was Thai.

The simple answer is yes. The nationality legislation sets no time limit for applying.

As with many of these things though, the onus is on the applicant(s) to prove that the child has at least one Thai parent. Obviously, the difficulty lies in the fact that some of the documentation may have gone missing over a long period of time.

Lack of documentation is a problem but not an insurmountable one. I'd check out posts by 'greenwander' who was born to a Thai national, but was unable to sufficiently prove it based on documentation alone. It was a long process for him, but I beleive that DNA testing to prove a relationship eventually led him to get a Thai ID card issued last month.