ASBURY PARK, N.J. — After decades without a country, Karina Ambartsoumian-Clough finally has a home she can call her own.

Last November, she and her husband, Kevin Clough, closed on a charming, single-family home in the beachside city of Asbury Park, N.J.

"I was, like, crying … in the closing. Then coming here, and I was like, 'Oh my God, I own this,'" she recalls.

Her long and complicated journey began in what was then the Soviet Union, where she was born in what is now Odesa, Ukraine. As a child, her Ukrainian mother and ethnic Armenian father, seeking to escape political and religious persecution and instability in the 1990s, brought her to the U.S. in 1996.

Ambartsoumian-Clough and her family never registered as citizens of Ukraine, the result of bureaucratic chaos and changing nat

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