CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. –Seventy-five adults from 40 countries will take the oath of U.S. citizenship at Thomas Jefferson’s home on Sunday, July 4.

The 42nd annual Monticello Independence Day Celebration and Naturalization Ceremony, which starts at 10 a.m., also will feature remarks by W. Richard West, Jr., founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, and patriotic music by the Charlottesville Municipal Band.

The event on Monticello’s West Lawn is free and open to the public. (The regular general admission fee will be charged for tours of the house.)

Since 1963, nearly 2,500 people have been sworn in as American citizens at the Monticello ceremony, which is presided over by the U.S. District Court, Western District of Virginia.

This year’s list of prospective citizens includes 38 women and 37 men. There are seven people each from Canada and India; five from Vietnam; four from Germany; three each from South Korea and Switzerland; two each from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bosnia-Herzegovina, China, Ghana, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Peru, the Philippines, Sweden, and Yugoslavia; and one each from Austria, Barbados, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Grenada, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and Venezuela.

All of the prospective citizens reside within the federal court’s Western District. They were selected for the Monticello ceremony by the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Additionally, two previously naturalized children – one from Cambodia, one from Russia – will receive certificates of U.S. citizenship at the Monticello event.

This July 4 will mark the 228th anniversary of American independence. Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, died at Monticello on the 50th anniversary, July 4, 1826.