Welcome
to the
Strafford County NH Genweb
Strafford County has been the home to many imigrants from England, Ireland, Canada and other countries. It offers a suburban or rural living, with a short commute to work or play. You are a half hour drive to several NH or Maine ocean beaches. The communities have excellent schools and libraries. Strafford County is home to the University of New Hampshire (UNH) in Durham.
You can ride Amtrak from Dover or Durham into Boston 5 times a day or ride to Portland in an hour
City of Dover
Population 28000 people on 28 sq. miles, Dover is the county seat. If you want to know anything about Strafford county, you have to come here. Dover has the county's only Daily newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat. It is a fine newspaper that covers the entire county. Dover has a great Library that has all of Foster's newspapers on microfilm. The Dover Library also has an obit index, online that covers obits from 1960 on. Bring dimes for printouts because they have every obit for Strafford County. With two very good microfilm machines, I was there just recently looking up obits in 1918
City of Rochester
Rochester is the largest community in Strafford County with almost 31000 people (I think I'm related to half of them). The city had a weekly paper called the Rochester Courier, which is no longer in print. However, most of them are on microfilm at the Rochester Library, a genealogy friendly library, with a helpful staff on Main St. The library also has an excellent website that has an obit index going back 100 years. Rochester has a lot of cemeteries. I guess that people who came here, just never left.
City of Somersworth
With 11,700 people on 10 sq. miles, Somersworth, like Rochester is located on the western bank of the Salmon Falls River. The east side is State of Maine. The river provided water power for mills. Many offspring of Somersworth have taken up residence accross the bridge in Maine and many from Maine into the Somersworth area. Any unsuccessful genealogical search should take you accross to the other state, where you might find that relative.
Many Irish and French imigrants entered Strafford County to work the mills. This resulted in "Irish Catholic Churchs" and "French Catholic Churchs". If you were a french Canadian working in the mills and met your mate also a french Canadian and wanted to get married, you would want the wedding vows done in french, so that you could understand them. If you were in Rollinsford, you simply walked across the bridge to the French church in So. Berwick, Maine. Hense, you were married in Maine, with a NH Marriage license.
Town of Durham
With 12,664 people on 25.5 miles(2 miles underwater)Durham is engulfed by UNH which has over 13400 full time enrolled students. A ride through town reveals that this is a massive campus
Other towns
Barrington, Farmington, Lee, Madbury, Middleton, Milton, New Durham, Rollinsford and Strafford
This is Pine Grove Cemetery in Barrington in Febuary . The people here are 7 feet under if you include the foot of snow.
This is the Salmon Falls Mills. From the Civil War until the turn of
the century, the only light was daylight from the windows
So it worked from dawn til sundown. After dark, until
morning, the spinners and looms were silent. The
mills
recruited imegrants from Quebec and Ireland. It was an
ocupation
you could learn by watching, even if you were language impaired.href="http://ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/nh/strafford//">Strafford Cty Transcription site
Strafford Cty message board
Strafford County Mailing list Archives
Below is an early county map of NH. You'll see there are only five counties. Almost all of Belknap and Carroll counties were part of Strafford. If you are looking for something in one of those counties prior to 1841, you might take this into consideration.
Page info
Hi I'm Dave Hough the coordinator for Strafford County
Send me any request that you have by E-mail -
This site was last updated febuary 2009
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