Hello,
I am an adult who was born and raised in California. When I was 25, back in 2004, I moved to Canada to marry my husband who is a Canadian citizen. I then applied for permanent residency while remaining there on visa. Complications with my case led to me remaining there for 6 years while enduring delays, misinformation and so on, culminating in my removal from Canada by exclusion order for one year.
This occurred at the end of October this year. Now I am trying to apply for college in the US for Fall 2011, and the applications ask for my state of residence.
In all the time I was in Canada, I still retained my parents' address in California as my permanent address, kept my bank account that was started in California, and kept a California drivers' license. I didn't file taxes (I usually let husband or father deal with that anyway) because I earned no income while in Canada and I had no accounts that earned interest.
However, before I entered California on November 2, 2010, I had not been back to the state for four years. I visited there in 2006 for a friends' wedding, and after that, remained in Canada while my permanent residency processing continued, and ultimately failed.
When I returned this month, though, the first thing I did was go straight to the California DMV to renew my drivers' license, which had expired a few months before. I was not denied a license--in fact, I currently have an interim one and am just waiting for the new card. On record, according to DMV when I called their help line, I've been renewed till 2015.
So given all that info, is my state of residence still California? I have tried to read up a bit about how to determine residency in this document (the State of California Franchise Tax Board publication 1031):
http://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2009/09_1031.pdf
But I am still not confident in my state residency, due to the fact I was not on Californian soil for 4 years, and have only returned to my home state in the past month. On the other hand, I never actually succeeded in gaining Canadian permanent residency either, so if I'm neither a resident in a Canadian province nor a Californian resident, I'm a resident nowhere. That's confusing.
In one of the college applications I'm filling out, it asks whether I have lived in California all my life, and if I have not I should declare my previous state and/or country residences. I am not sure how to answer that. I did physically "live" in Canada, but it was never my legal place of residence. I don't want to answer that I lived abroad until November and end up being counted as a non-resident of California, but on the other hand if I omit that fact I might risk being rejected for not providing all necessary information.
So as you can see I'm quite stuck in a complicated situation. I hope there is someone here who can help me out with some advice.
Thank you,
C.

