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How to Research Your Family History in New Hampshire

New Hampshire runs on the New England pattern – towns keep the vital records, counties keep deeds and probate – but adds a gift most of its neighbors lack: the state began gathering copies of town vital records in the 1860s and built a statewide card index reaching back toward the earliest town books, so a single centralized search covers events that would take a hundred town-hall visits elsewhere. Behind the civil record sit the published Provincial and State Papers (forty-odd volumes of colonial and Revolutionary material), the Scots-Irish founding of Londonderry, and the Franco-American mill cities whose parish registers connect straight to Québec.

Start With Vital Records – The Central Index First

Towns recorded births, marriages, and deaths from their founding – Portsmouth, Dover, Exeter, and Hampton from the 1630s–1640s. From 1866 the state required towns to forward copies, and the resulting statewide collection, with its famous card index of births, marriages, and deaths (covering pre-1866 town-book copies as well), is administered by the Division of Vital Records Administration and has been microfilmed and digitized – the early portions are searchable on the major platforms and FamilySearch. Start every New Hampshire line in the statewide index; go to the town clerk’s original register to verify and to catch what the cards missed. Recent records are restricted to family under the state’s access rules; historical records are open.

Divorces are county-level Superior Court matters (with early divorces in provincial and legislative records).

County Registries: Deeds And Probate

Until 1771 New Hampshire had no counties at all – province-level courts and recording covered everything – so pre-1771 deeds and probate are provincial series, not county ones. After 1771, chart the county chain as the ten counties took shape.

  • Registry of Deeds – one per county (ten counties), with Rockingham’s books reaching deep into the provincial era; nearly all registries offer online search of historical and modern volumes.
  • Probate – county probate jurisdiction (today within the Circuit Court’s probate division) holds wills, administrations, inventories, and guardianships; the older county probate files are microfilmed and heavily digitized, and provincial-era probate (pre-1771, before counties existed) was centralized – those earliest estate files are published and archived as a single provincial series, a colonial convenience like Maryland’s.

The State Archives And The Published Papers

The New Hampshire State Archives (Concord) holds the provincial and state government record: court files, legislative petitions (settlers petitioned constantly – petitions carry dozens of signatures placing men in towns and years), town charters, and military rolls. Much of the colonial and Revolutionary core was published a century ago as the New Hampshire Provincial and State Papers – roughly forty volumes of charters, town grants, war rolls, and association test signers – digitized and keyword-searchable online, making the 1600s–1700s unusually reachable from home. The New Hampshire Historical Society (Concord) adds manuscripts, family papers, town histories, and newspapers.

The Scots-Irish And Hill-Town Lines

Londonderry’s 1719 settlement seeded Scots-Irish families across the state and beyond; their Presbyterian church records, the town’s early registers, and the published town histories document the community densely – and because New Hampshire’s town-history literature is among New England’s best, check for a published history of every ancestral town before reconstructing from scratch. Congregational church records fill gaps town clerks left, and cemetery transcription projects blanket the state.

The Franco-American Mill Cities

Manchester – built around the Amoskeag mills, once the largest textile plant in the world – with Nashua, Berlin, and the other mill towns drew waves of Québécois families from the 1860s onward. Their record home is the Catholic parish register, and the bridge to Canada is short and well-built: the American-Canadian Genealogical Society in Manchester specializes in exactly this migration, and Québec’s parish registers are completely indexed and digitized. The sequence: mill-city parish register → home parish in Québec → centuries of Québec records. Amoskeag employment records and the mill-city directories (nearly annual) add the working-life trail.

Other Paths

Revolutionary and colonial service: the published rolls in the State Papers plus federal pension files. Maritime Portsmouth: customs, crew, and shipyard records through the National Archives and Portsmouth Athenaeum. Abenaki ancestry: colonial records, mission registers (often on the Canadian side at Odanak/St. Francis), and community organizations; New Hampshire-side documentation is thin and interwoven with Québec sources.

Online And Free

The Provincial and State Papers are free online. The statewide vital index circulates on FamilySearch and the platforms (free through New Hampshire libraries). Registry of Deeds search is online in every county. FamilySearch carries the filmed town, probate, and church records, plus the full Québec collections behind Franco lines. American Ancestors adds the deep New England databases.

Research Checklist

  1. Search the statewide vital card index first; verify in the town register.
  2. Sort the layers: town (vital), county (deeds, probate – post-1771), province (everything before 1771).
  3. Read the published town history and the Provincial and State Papers for every colonial line.
  4. Work the county Registry of Deeds online; pull the digitized probate files.
  5. Franco-American line: parish register in the mill city, then straight into Québec’s indexes via ACGS.
  6. Petitions and war rolls place colonial men in time and town – use them like censuses.

Sources and References