Too many government agencies have their public records buried in their websites, obscurely titled and often vital records aren’t indexed online at all.

Last year, I wrote about Connecticut towns that included civil unions among their online records indexes. New Hampshire year-end town reports — which you would think are just about tax revenue and budgets — include births, marriages, civil unions, deaths and burials that have been registered that year. This usually follows, unannounced, after the town clerk’s revenue report. In this example, the vital records for the year begin on page 187! These are all pdf’s, so you can easily save them to your computer should you be so inclined.

Is this common knowledge among New Hampshire private investigators?

Apart from searching around the government website for the “town of” to find the annual report, you can query it from a search engine. One of the key phrases is, “RESIDENT CIVIL UNION REPORT” or replace “civil union” with “marriage”, “death”, etc. Now if you want to search a name and don’t know the year or even the town, you know your research gets more complicated. But start by adding “lastname firstname” to the above search query. The website archive.org has a collection of some New Hampshire town reports and you can search across them by name, like this: “lastname firstname” site:archive.org. If that returns too many documents, add key phrases, such as, intitle:”annual report of the town” or “place of birth”.