The Declaration of Intention was the first step of US naturalization in the 1920s — a sworn statement that the applicant intended to become a citizen, filed before the formal Petition for Naturalization that followed. Lazaros filed his declaration on April 23, 1924 in New York; the final naturalization came September 10, 1928, four years later.
This document is the deepest contemporary documentary anchor we have for Lazaros’s pre-1928 life — birth date and place, ship of arrival, address at filing, occupation, and physical description, all in his own hand.