A reader wrote: :I am doing research on my husband's family. They were located all :over Concord, Vt. Waterford,East Concord, Lunenburg as well as :Northumberland, NH, Lisbon, Bethlehem, & Lancaster. [snip] :I have written to several of the towns and I get no reply. I wrote :to Dalton, NH and they charge 12.00 per research item. [snip] I'd like to comment about the town clerk in northern New Hampshire. I can't speak for the Vermont towns mentioned, though they're within 25 miles of where I live, but I was assistant town clerk of one of the New Hampshire towns mentioned. Lancaster, the biggest of the towns mentioned, had 3,280 people in the 2000 census. Dalton had 927 people, and is consistently, from census to census, one of the poorest towns in the state. Dalton's very limited town services are paid for entirely through property taxes. The current municipal operating budget of $536,406 does not include subsidies for non-residents interested in their Dalton ancestors. The budget probably does have a few hundred dollars for the town clerk, but that money will be allocated to expenses only (utilities, postage, phone), and accounted for to the penny next March at town meeting. The northern New Hampshire town clerk is almost always a part-time elected official, generally unsalaried by the town, and in the smallest towns often working from home. For each official performance of duty the town clerk receives a state-specified fee -- perhaps eight bucks for an auto registration, a dollar for a dog license, six bucks for a marriage registration. Town clerks don't handle voter registrations, which fall to elected supervisors of the checklist, who receive a per diem for days worked by law in election years. We have as few elections as possible because "they cost money," as our elected officials remind us from time to time. In a town the size of Dalton, there aren't that many duties in a given year, and so the Dalton town clerk might accumulate $8,000 a year in fees. It's essentially a part-time job with split-shift hours (to accommodate citizen access) for which the compensation might work out to $8.00 an hour -- McDonald's money. Unless the town has established fees for vital record lookups, the town clerk may not be compensated at all for time researching a research query "from away." If the Dalton town clerk has, with the permission of the selectmen, established a $12.00 fee for VR lookups, then good for her! She will be paid something for her time. The fact that there is a fee suggests that she has done lookups before and that requests will in fact be answered. The existence of a fee simply reflects the principle of no free lunch. It's important, when sending a query to a rural town clerk, to (a) Enclose an SASE (or better, obtain a phone number and call, saving the necessity of a written response). (b) Offer explicitly and up-front to cover fees and expenses. (c) Be courteous -- as a non-resident, you're asking a favor, not demanding a publicly-funded service to which you are entitled as a taxpayer somewhere else. (d) Remember that almost none of these towns have their vital records indexed. For $12.00, the Dalton town clerk will go through the old leatherbound volumes page by page to find the requested item, and then prepare and send you a written certificate. That's an incredible bargain. Chris Christopher Brooks Littleton, NH