Newly released government records are offering more details about the life of one of Senator Clinton’s Jewish relatives, Adeline Rosenberg — and indicating that the relationship between the future presidential candidate and her half-aunt may have been closer than previously reported. In a passport application filed in 1984, Rosenberg, then 50, had the option to name any friend or relative to be contacted in the event of an emergency. “Hilary [sic] Rodham Clinton, Governor’s Mansion, Little Rock, Ark. 72206,” Rosenberg wrote on the form, describing Mrs. Clinton as her niece.

Rosenberg’s name surfaced in an eye-catching 1999 article in the Forward newspaper reporting that the then-first lady had Jewish relatives, a fact which may have helped buttress her support in New York. Rosenberg, who died in 1998, was a child of the second marriage of Mrs. Clinton’s maternal grandmother, Della Murray.

One member of the Chicago-based Jewish branch of the New York senator’s family, Alice Segal, 77, said yesterday that she didn’t know much about Rosenberg’s contacts with Mrs. Clinton but got the impression that it was a “pretty close” relationship. “I’m not surprised that she put that down,” Ms. Segal said of Mrs. Clinton being listed as, in effect, Rosenberg’s next of kin. “I think that’s fascinating.”

Other details in the passport records, which The New York Sun requested from the State Department in October and obtained last week, also support an account the Sun published in November about the summer Mrs. Clinton and her future husband, President Clinton, spent in Berkeley, Calif. in 1971 while she clerked at a left-wing Oakland law firm.

Relatives said Rosenberg was a singer who traveled often and that she lent the future Mrs. Clinton an apartment in Berkeley that summer. Ms. Segal and others said Rosenberg returned early from a trip and was surprised to find Bill Clinton staying at her abode.

The newly disclosed files show that Rosenberg applied for a passport in January 1971 and reported plans to depart in April of that year on a three-to-six month trip to Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Israel. That dovetails with her returning and meeting the young Yale Law School students sometime that summer.

The documents also seem to confirm that the Clintons lived in Berkeley on Derby Street, just a few blocks from the University of California campus.

The State Department files also include two affidavits in which friends of Rosenberg, who became an attorney in 1981, explained that she used a stage name, “Addie Ross,” because she was previously in “show business” and traveled throughout the Far East on a USO tour in 1963.

Mrs. Clinton has not spoken at length about her relationship with Rosenberg. The fact that she briefly lent the future first lady and presidential candidate the Berkeley apartment appears in Mr. Clinton’s autobiography, but not in his wife’s. However, in 1999, Mrs. Clinton said through a spokesman that she had “fond memories” of Rosenberg’s father, Max, taking her to a Chicago amusement park, Kiddieland.