NHVRIN stands for the “New Hampshire Vital Records Information Network”. The New Hampshire Division of Vital Records Administration (DVRA) developed NHVRIN in 2004 in order to collect and disseminate Vital Records events. The state’s 234 local City and Town Clerks, 25 Birth Hospitals, 90 Funeral Homes, several physicians and 15 state office staff use NHVRIN to annually enter in approximately 10,000 marriage records, 15,000 birth records, 9,500 death records and 5,000 divorce records (respectively). These are about the number of annual events that occur in a state the size of ours (1.3 million).

DVRA is fully aware of the overall importance of regularly examining Vital Records information in order to:

• Track and evaluate community progress toward goals.
   
• Guide population-based policy decisions, priorities and long-range strategic plans.
   
• Develop, focus, and streamline data collection and reporting capacity.
   
• Provide comprehensive information for use by New Hampshire's health and health care system.
   

Therefore, the Division has worked to promote the use of Vital Records information by developing the NHVRINweb tool. NHVRINweb was developed through the use of Vital Records Improvement Funds in 2006 by Constella Group, LLC, and provides the general public and the researcher a user-friendly data mining tool that can be used to pull out useful information from the Division’s databases.

A unique aspect of NHVRINweb is that the data that is available to the researcher is current data. The NHVRINweb databases are refreshed every day with events that just occurred. This provides a researcher a great benefit, but must be used cautiously. Our data must be considered as a fine wine is considered – raw and bold initially, but ages well. Some of the processes that go on with our data after they have been entered into NHVRIN are applying cause of death codes, entering in out-of-state records for birth and death events that occurred to New Hampshire residents, and changing records that may have had errors in them or had incorrect codes saved in them.