Starting With Concord, NH Obituary Research
Concord, New Hampshire is the state capital and the seat of Merrimack County. Its obituaries live in a few different places, scattered across newspapers, town records, and online databases. If you just search "Concord NH obituary" you will mostly get current results from the Concord Monitor or legacy.com. That is fine for recent deaths. It does not help you at all when you are trying to trace a family line back to the 1800s or earlier. The real work starts when you accept that most pre-1950 obituaries are not indexed anywhere useful. You have to go to the primary sources and pull them out yourself.
Uncovering The Hidden Stories Of Concord Nh Obituaries A Glimpse Into The Communitys Rich History
This is what that process actually looks like in practice. I have spent years doing this for clients and for my own family tree. The short version is that you need to work through three layers: newspaper archives at the state level, municipal vital records, and church or society publications that sometimes ran notices the big papers missed. The long version involves learning which microfilm reels to grab and which databases quietly hide their Concord content behind a paywall. The New Hampshire State Archives in Concord holds the largest collection of obituary-related material in the state. They have newspaper microfilm going back to the early 1700s, and they also hold personal papers, society records, and church registers that contain death notices not printed elsewhere. You can visit in person, but if you are not local it is often faster to request a scan of a specific page or two. They charge by the hour for research assistance, and the rate is reasonable compared to hiring a professional genealogist. As of my last visit it was around sixty dollars an hour, and a typical obituary hunt for a single person in a given year takes about twenty minutes of actual research time once you know the date range. The Concord Monitor archives are available through microfilm at the State Archives and also through Newspapers.com. The library of Congress Chronicling America has some Concord papers but mostly from before 1922. ProQuest Historical Newspapers has the Monitor but requires a subscription through a participating library. If you have a library card at a university or a large public library system, check whether they provide access. Many people do not realize their local library system already pays for this.
The Merrimack County Angle
Obituaries in Concord often mention family members who lived in surrounding towns. Franklin, Bedford, Hooksett, and Merrimack all feed into the same newspaper circulation area. When I was researching a branch of my own family with roots in the Franklin area, I found that the Concord Monitor ran the obituary for an ancestor even though she died at home in Franklin. The notice listed her as a resident of Franklin. If you only search the Franklin town records, you miss it. Always expand your search radius by twenty miles or so when dealing with Concord area obituaries. Merrimack County probate records are another layer. The county probate court keeps files that sometimes include printed copies of obituaries submitted by the family. These files are searchable at the State Archives under the decedent's name. The index is not perfect. There are gaps, particularly for the period between 1850 and 1900, where some files were lost or never transferred. I hit this wall hard when researching a great-great-grandmother who died in 1873. The probate file simply did not exist in the index. I found her obituary only after pulling the local newspaper microfilm for that month and scanning every page, which took about forty-five minutes.
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Town Clerks And Vital Records
New Hampshire town clerks maintain death records. Concord's clerk's office keeps death certificates going back to the state-wide registration law of 1909. Before that date, records are spotty and often held by the family or the church. The state does compile some pre-1909 death data, but the quality varies enormously by town. For Concord specifically, you are often better off looking at newspaper death notices than waiting on the clerk for information prior to 1910. The state also has a mortality schedule program, borrowed from the census, that lists deaths by town and year. These are available at the State Archives and sometimes online through Ancestry. They are not obituaries, but they give you the date, age, cause of death, and place of birth for people who died in Concord. That usually points you toward the right newspaper issue to check.
A Specific Problem I Ran Into
I was researching a man named William H. Thayer who died in Concord sometime in the late 1880s. His name appeared in several census records but I could not find an obituary. Newspapers.com showed a partial transcription that only had his first name and last initial. The microfilm at the State Archives had the actual clipping, and it turned out his full name was William Harvey Thayer and he was a partner in a local lumber firm. The newspaper had listed him as W. H. Thayer in the death notice. Indexers sometimes drop middle initials, and this cost me probably six weeks of searching across multiple databases. The workaround was simple but tedious: I made a list of every Thayer in the 1880 and 1890 census for Merrimack County, noted which ones were dead by 1900, and then checked the Concord Monitor microfilm for each relevant year. It took about three hours total but eliminated the guesswork. Concord has several old churches with published records. St. Paul's Episcopal Church, the First Congregational Church, and others kept parish registers that included death memorials. These are not always indexed. The Congregational church materials are partly at the State Archives and partly at the Congregational Library in Boston. You have to request copies or visit. The Episcopal records are mostly at the State Archives. Beneficent Society records are another source. Concord had numerous mutual aid societies, lodge groups, and charitable organizations in the nineteenth century. When a member died, these groups often published a notice in their own circulars or in the local paper. The New Hampshire Historical Society has some of these records, and the State Archives has more. They are easy to overlook because they are not filed under the person's name initially. You have to know the society existed and then search its records. I found an obituary for an ancestor this way after failing to locate one in any newspaper. She had been a member of a women's temperance organization, and the notice only appeared in their quarterly publication.
Digital Databases And Their Limits
Ancestry, Find a Grave, FamilySearch, and Legacy.com all have Concord obituary content, but they are incomplete and inconsistently transcribed. Find a Grave has thousands of headstone photos for Concord cemeteries like Elmwood Cemetery and Pine Grove Cemetery. These give you dates and sometimes a name, but they do not give you the narrative content of an obituary. Legacy.com is useful for modern records, mostly post-1990, and mirrors what the Monitor publishes. Ancestry's newspaper collections are decent but require a paid subscription and still miss a lot of regional content. FamilySearch is free and has some Concord obituary images in its digital library, but the search interface is slow and the metadata is often wrong. I have spent more time correcting mislabeled records on FamilySearch than I care to admit. Use it as a starting point, not an endpoint.
What You Will Miss
Some obituaries simply do not survive. Fires, floods, poor storage, and neglect have destroyed a significant portion of New Hampshire newspaper archives. The Civil War era is particularly thin for smaller papers. Some families also chose not to publish obituaries, especially in earlier decades when death was more and announcements were made through word of mouth or church bulletins rather than newspapers. If an ancestor died during a period of economic hardship, like the Panic of 1873 or the early 1930s, the likelihood of a formal obituary drops noticeably. Working-class families often could not afford the per-line charges that newspapers imposed. Another limitation is that women and children were frequently underreported. A married woman's obituary might list her only as "wife of" without her maiden name. Children's deaths were sometimes noted in a single line within a family notice. This is not unique to Concord, but it is something you need to adjust your search strategy for. Searching only by the person's full name will leave gaps.
Practical Steps That Actually Work
Start with the death date and the place of death. Narrow it to Concord if possible. Pull the census record for that household the year before the death. Note the names of surviving family members. Those names will appear in the obituary and become useful cross-references. Check the State Archives newspaper microfilm for that date range. If you cannot visit, order digitized copies through the archives or use Newspapers.com. Then check probate files at the county level. After that, look at church and society records if you know which ones the family belonged to. Finally, check Find a Grave for cemetery placement and any inscribed details. The whole process for a single person in Concord, working backwards from a known death date, usually takes between two and four hours spread across a week. If you are searching without a known date, it can take days or weeks because you have to triangulate from census records, city directories, and land records first. City directories are another resource I have not emphasized enough. The Concord city directory archive at the State Archives goes back to the mid-nineteenth century and sometimes includes brief death annotations in the margin next to a listing. There is no single database that covers this well. The work is in the combining of sources and the patience to check microfilm when the digital version fails you. That is what the hidden stories are. They are not in one place. They are in the gaps between the indexes.
