How to research your New Hampshire Ancestor, even if you are nowhere near the Granite State

With permanent European settlement that started in 1623, New Hampshire has a long history.  It is also one of the thirteen original English colonies that revolted against King George in the American Revolution.  There are a plethora of documents, records and archives to explore if your American ancestry started in New Hampshire, or passed through here on their way to other states.  Here is a list of ways to access those resources from your home.

Places you can search online:

FamilySearch.org – This website has NH births from 1714 – 1904, Deaths from 1654 – 1949, Marriages from 1637 – 1959, several county probate files, and town clerk records.  Many are complete with scanned images.  There are 18,960 books that came up when I searched for the words “New Hampshire”.   All Federal Census records 1790 – 1940 (except for 1890) are available here. Their research wiki for the state of New Hampshire is: https://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/New_Hampshire

Cyndi’s List of New Hampshire resources - http://cyndislist.com/us/nh/

The Lane Library, Hampton, NH- Hampton was founded in 1638 and has a wonderful collection of online resources that include many of the original seacoast communities in Rockingham County.  See this page for their genealogy page: http://www.hampton.lib.nh.us/hampton/genealogy.htm

Linkpendium New Hampshire links:  http://www.linkpendium.com/genealogy/USA/NH/

New Hampshire Deeds Online http://www.nhdeeds.com/  dating from the 1620s to the present

NH Search Roots website http://www.nh.searchroots.com/

The Pelham Historical Society Online Library – from Pelham, NH, this is a wonderful, little known resource of local history records online http://www.pelhamnhhistory.org/library/onlinelibrary.html

Where to Write for New Hampshire Vital Records http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/w2w/new_hampshire.htm

Good books:

Documents and Records Relating to New Hampshire (known as the NH Provincial and State Papers) in 40 Volumes available online at http://www.library.unh.edu/diglib/bookshelf/NHPapers/volume.shtml  the links lead to Internet Archive, and you can read online (searchable) or download several versions of files.  These papers are the accumulated documents from the settlement of New Hampshire to the year 1800.

Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire, by Charles T. Libbey, 1928  available online at http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=3166&cj=1&netid=cj&o_xid=0001231185&o_lid=0001231185&o_sch=Affiliate+External  searchable and browsable with paid subscription

Genealogists Handbook for New England Research, 5^th edition, edited by Michael Leclerc, NEHGS, 2012

Index to Genealogies in New Hampshire Town Histories, by William Copely, 1988

The New Hampshire Genealogical Record, the journal produced by the New Hampshire Genealogical Society from 1900 to the present.

Social Networking  and Message Boards:

All Things History- Rockingham County, NH on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/200460270133276/

Descendants of the First Families of New Hampshire on Facebook  https://www.facebook.com/groups/NHFirstFamilies/

New Hampshire Mayflower Society on Facebook  https://www.facebook.com/groups/NHMayflower/

New Hampshire Roots at Yahoo  https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/newhampshireroots/info

NH Genealogy, Digging New Hampshire Roots on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/DiggingNHRoots/

New Hampshire Genealogy Network on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/205180789528062/

(don’t forget that many New Hampshire historical societies have websites and Facebook groups, and some even have Twitter accounts)

Societies:

American Canadian Genealogical Society    www.acgs.org

Association of Historical Societies in NH   www.historicalsocietiesnh.org

Manchester, NH Historic Association   www.manchesterhistoric.org

New England Historic Genealogical Society  www.americanancestors.org

New Hampshire Historical Society   www.nhhistory.org

New Hampshire Mayflower Society  www.nhmayflower.org

New Hampshire Society of Genealogists   http://nhsog.org

Order of the First Families of New Hampshire   http://offnh.homestead.com/

Strafford County Genealogical Society   www.straffgen.org

Places that can help you by fee:

American Canadian Genealogical Society – located in Manchester, NH, this is the largest resource facility for French-Canadian research in the United States.  See this webpage for their research services http://acgs.org/research/services/

National Archives at Boston, located in Waltham, Massachusetts.  The staff will provide reference assistance to you but also maintains a list of researchers for hire at this link:  http://www.archives.gov/research/hire-help/

The New England Historic Genealogical Society – Located in Boston, it is the oldest genealogical society in the world.  You can reach their research Services department at this link: http://www.americanancestors.org/research-services/

The New Hampshire Historical Society Library- located in Concord, NH, their research services can be ordered online and by telephone or mail.  For details see the page http://www.nhhistory.org/research-services.html or call the reference staff at 603-856-0641.  Photocopies are 35 cents per page for non-members and 25 cents for members, plus $7 for mailing or fax.

The Portsmouth Atheneum – This private library dates from 1817, and is the repository of hundreds of family papers, manuscripts, photographs, and ephemera from New Hampshire and New England.  It is located in Market Square in Portsmouth, NH, and the staff will do quick reference requests as time allows, and in-depth research requests for $30/hour with a 1 hour minimum.  See this link for more information: http://www.portsmouthathenaeum.org/collections.html

And…

Don’t forget your local Family History Library.  You can order microfilms from their website to be delivered to your local Family History Library, and you can look at them there for a small fee. If you need assistance, the volunteers will even help you to search for the records online and help you place your order.  

Hello from New Hampshire, USA

Hello!  My name is Heather Wilkinson Rojo.  I've lived for 30 years in New Hampshire, and  I grew up in Beverly, Massachusetts where many of my ancestors lived since the 1630s. I also spent my school years in central Massachusetts in the adorably quintessential New England town of Holden.   I had one set of 5^th great grandparents who were married there in Holden, in the same church where my husband and were married.  Centuries of my ancestors were baptized in the Congregational church in Beverly, where I was baptized, too.

Four years ago I started a blog called Nutfield Genealogy, named for the original grant of land where the first Ulster Presbyterians first settled in 1719.  They renamed it Londonderry in honor of the county in Northern Ireland where they came from.  Their pastor, Reverend James MacGregor of Aghadowey, brought his flock of Scots Irish settlers to Nutfield, and I've learned a lot about them over the past 30 years.  I even learned that I had two Scots Irish minister ancestors, too, but they were in Massachusetts.

I started doing genealogy as a young teen in Holden.  I didn't know any of my ancestors, nor did my parents.  The lucky thing about starting my genealogy young was that I was able to interview my grandparents and their siblings.  My grandmother remembered her grandfather, who was in the Civil War!  I took a few genealogy classes, but I was already hooked on family history. 

In the past 35 years or so I have found a dozen Mayflower ancestors,  several ancestors hung as witches in Salem in 1692, traveled to Europe, Nova Scotia and Hawaii for research, read tons of books, and squinted at miles of microfilm.  I have pages and pages of notes, and many terabits of information and images saved.  It’s now time to take all that information and write up the stories.

Blogging is the perfect platform for a beginning writer.  You need only post a few paragraphs each day.  You can skip days and no one will care, but your followers will care enough to bug you if you take too much time off.  Cousin connections and collaborations with other researchers happen automatically, often by pure serendipity as soon as your blog posts appear in search engines.  All this has happened by luck, even without any planned “cousin bait” blog posts.   

As I write about my New England ancestors, I find deep connections to the area where I live.  It is impossible to drive far without seeing an ancestor’s surname on a street sign or in a cemetery.  Weddings and funerals of friends and relatives are often at churches where my ancestors were married, or in burial grounds where they are interred, too.  After nearly 400 years in just a few counties of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine I feel rooted in time and history.  But I often think about those voyages across the Atlantic from Europe in the 1600s, and of connecting to my roots abroad.

On the other hand, I married a first generation American.  When I visit his parents’ villages in Spain I feel a deeper connection.  My father-in-law was baptized in a church built over 1200 years ago, and  generations of his family lived in that same spot.  My mother-in-law came from a military family on the border with Portugal where for hundreds, maybe thousands of years the political borders moved back and forth but the people stayed in place as the names of the villages changed.  It truly gives me a feeling that all our family histories go back millenniums as we all get our DNA results and find we are connected.  Even my very British New England Yankee family shares haplogroup H with my Spanish mother-in-law.  Perhaps many millenniums ago we were cousins?

And so according to our Ancestry.com DNA results, my husband has more British ancestry than me, and I have more Iberian ancestry than him.  He has more Irish ancestry than I do, and where did I get Viking DNA? 

That is worldwide genealogy!