Welcome to the New Hampshire Vital Records Information Network Web Query site.

NHVRINweb is a service of the New Hampshire Department of State's Division of Vital Records Administration. This site will ONLY allow you to query New Hampshire's events for birth, death, marriage and divorce.

This site is not used for pronouncing, certifying or registering vital records events.

In 2003, the New Hampshire legislature passed a law that clarified the state's right-to-know law, RSA 91-A, in regard to access to state data sets. They did this to promote broader public access to electronic databases maintained by state government. The law established a procedure by which state data can be made available to researchers after the data have been "scrubbed" of any personal identifying information. The purpose of the law is to:

1. Preserve the confidentiality of individually identifiable information in the possession of the state;
2. Ensure that public business is conducted in a transparent manner essential to a democratic society;
3. Ensure that information and data collected or maintained with public funds is held for the collective benefit of the citizenry; and
4. Improve public policy and program administration through more efficient and effective analysis of information and data.

The Department of State developed NHVRINweb to satisfy the intent of this legislation, and to get Vital Records data in the hands of researchers and the general public.

Caveat Number 1

The data that populates the NHVRINweb tool is VERY current. For example, a record of birth that was entered into the state database yesterday will be in the NHVRINweb database today. Although this is a unique opportunity to query real-time records, there are down sides to this immediacy. There are several types of codes that may need to be applied to some record or another. Cause of death codes may take several months to be applied to a death record. We may not receive out-of-state events of birth and death to New Hampshire residents for many months, and it may take up to a year to both enter the record and apply the codes to these events. Your query may simply be the numbers of events of birth that occurred in Exeter, NH for the current year. You could be very confident that the results you get are quite accurate and are not likely to change over time. Alternatively, your query may be for the leading causes of cancer for all New Hampshire resident deaths, and it may literally take a year to have complete data you could be confident in. Please check with us through the "Contact Us" link if you want to ask questions on this concern of ours.

Caveat Number 2

The NHVRINweb tool allows you to dissect the full state dataset spanning many years into very small packets of information. As you choose parameters (such as age, gender, location, race, rate, etc.) to drill down into the data, some of the worth may be lost, or improper or inaccurate conclusions may be given certain small datasets. This is fairly eloquently described by a State Employee whose job is looking at and reporting on state level data:

The bigger the numbers the better statistics function. If a planned subdivision of 15 houses in Manchester does not get built, its no big deal. The same defunct subdivision in the Town of Hill will blow an estimate or projection out of the water. The more ANYBODY slices and dices it, the greater the error. There are two ways to slice and dice population data; subject matter and geography.

Total state population is 1.3 million, and it's a piece of cake to estimate and project. Break it into 234 geographic pieces and you've got a much greater problem with very significant errors in the small towns. Then at the town level we could cut by: gender, age (how many age groups 18?, by gender that's 36) by race (5?) by ethnicity (?) ! If I do that math I get 758,160 cells of data. The numbers would end up just above random chance; they would just be too small.

The data users should make every effort, including some tradeoffs, to go with the largest geography and most general numbers to meet needs. Be careful of the queries being made. It's a statistical fact that most researchers grew up in larger states and metropolitan areas, and they may have little appreciation of the statistical facts of life in a small, rural state.

Caveat Number 3

The data that populates the NHVRINweb tool is based on a calendar year. Therefore, if you run a query in August of the current year, you may be confused by the fact that certain events may be reduced by one third compared to the previous years data

Attention: The results of your query are subject to several limitations as explained in the caveat section of the vital records electronic information system. Please review these caveats carefully as they may impact your results. Researchers and policy makers should contact the DHHS Bureau of Public Health Statistics and Informatics within Division of Public Health Services for analysis and assistance.