Gurney Genealogy Library Updated 4 August 2026 by Allen Gurney

John Gurney (c. 1603 – 1662/3)

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Tailor, and the first Gurney to settle in North America. The leading candidate for his father is Francis Gurney, Merchant Taylor of Norfolk and London.

Born
About 1603, in England; the place is unknown. The only statement of his age is his own, made in a 1653 Massachusetts court deposition, where he gave it as "about 50." No baptism has been found, and no surviving record names where he was born. 1
Died
1662/3, Braintree, Massachusetts. He died intestate; an inventory of his estate was taken at Boston on 16 March 1662/3 and valued at £55 14s 6d. 2
Occupation
Tailor — the trade by which he is named in colonial records, including the 1661 Braintree deed in which he is styled "John Gurney, tailor." 3
Buried
Braintree, Massachusetts; a later memorial places his grave at Elm Street Cemetery. 4
Marriage(s)
Mary (maiden name unknown) — married in England, by the later 1620s. She died at Braintree on 20 September 1661. 5
Grizzell Fletcher — a much-married Braintree widow, married at Braintree on 12 November 1661; John was her fourth husband. 6

Highlights

  • The first Gurney in North America. A tailor who crossed from England around 1640, John is the emigrant ancestor from whom this branch of the American Gurneys descends. He is first recorded in the colony at Weymouth in June 1641. 7
  • His English origin is unsolved, and the leading candidate is a Merchant Taylor's son. The best-supported identification makes him a son of Francis Gurney (G14) of Norfolk and London, by Francis's first wife Margaret Rybett — a match in trade, in the emigrant corridor, and in family circumstance, and the only candidate left standing with a coherent case after every other documented John Gurney of the period has been weighed. It is not proven, and no record names him as Francis's son. The John Gurney case file sets out the full argument. 8
  • Land in town after town, on a tradesman's purse. A tailor of modest means — his goods were appraised at just £55 14s 6d — John nonetheless held close to a dozen New England parcels over his life: grant lots at Weymouth, a house and farmland of his own at Braintree, the leased Tyng farm, and frontier allotments at Billerica and Mendon. 9
  • The land he farmed became the home of presidents. From 1647 until 1662 John leased a forty-five-acre Braintree farm from the Boston merchant William Tyng. A century later its northern fields became the Adams family seat and the birthplaces of Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams. 15
  • A trusted neighbor. John was repeatedly relied on by his Braintree neighbors — he signed the 1645 petition for the new plantation and served as a witness and appraiser for other families' estates. 10
  • The next generation met the frontier's violence. Two of his sons died in King Philip's War — John Jr. in the Mendon massacre of July 1675 and Peter, a soldier in Captain Isaac Johnson's company, in the fighting of 1676 — while a third son, Richard (G12), carried the direct line forward at Weymouth. 11

Children

All were born to his first wife, Mary. Mary, Richard and John Jr. were born in England; Peter and Isaac were almost certainly born in Massachusetts, since no baptism for either survives anywhere in Britain.

Name Dates Notes
Sarah GurneyunknownListed first in the compiled genealogies and so treated as the eldest, but no record of any kind attests her — no baptism, marriage or death, and no entry in the standard survey of New England marriages before 1700. She may not have existed. 12
Mary Gurneyborn by 1631Married Daniel Shed at Braintree in 1647; Shed came from Finchingfield, Essex. Her marriage is what fixes her birth: at a minimum marriage age of sixteen she was born by 1631, which makes her the only one of the children with a date resting on a record rather than an estimate. 13
Richard Gurneyc. 1630–1634G12 in the direct line; of Weymouth; admitted Freeman in 1681; married Rebecca Taylor. 14
John Gurney Jr.c. 1633–1636Of Weymouth and Mendon; killed in the Mendon massacre, July 1675, in King Philip's War. 11
Peter Gurneyc. 1635–1641Likel born in Massachusetts, on the evidence that no Peter Gurney baptism exists anywhere in Britain in the years he could have been born. A soldier in Captain Isaac Johnson's company, mustered at Dedham in December 1675 for the Narragansett campaign; killed in King Philip's War in 1676. 11 16
Isaac Gurneyc. 1643 (uncertain)Likely born in Massachusetts, on the same evidence. A young Isaac Gurney surfaces in the Middlesex and Suffolk court records of 1666–67, in trouble with the law in the Blue Hill country behind Braintree. The uncommon name, the age fit and the location make him almost certainly this family's Isaac, though no record yet states the parentage. 12 16

Narrative

John Gurney is the immigrant ancestor of this branch of the family — the first Gurney to cross the Atlantic. A tailor by trade, he appears in the records of Massachusetts Bay by June 1641, when the General Court remitted a fine he had incurred at Weymouth "for want of gunpowder." Over the next two decades he moved among the south-shore towns of Weymouth and Braintree, raised a large family, and died at Braintree in the winter of 1662/3, leaving a modest estate and no will.7

Where John came from is the one large unanswered question about him, and the leading answer makes him a son of Francis Gurney (G14), a Merchant Taylor of Norfolk and London, by Francis's first wife Margaret Rybett, whom Francis married at Norwich in 1611. Four threads tie John to that household. His trade as a tailor is what a Merchant Taylor's son would be expected to follow, since crafts passed from father to son. Francis lived inside the East Anglia-to-London belt that sent roughly three in five Massachusetts Bay emigrants of the 1630s. His forced sale of every acre he owned in 1634 left a grown son nothing to stay for. And John's colonial world is dense with the Essex and Norfolk connections of Francis's family.8

It is a case built entirely from circumstance. No surviving document names a John Gurney as Francis's son, no baptism of his has been found, and the years in which one would fall are lost from the East Dereham register, with no second copy anywhere — so the question can never be settled from that parish. Every other documented John Gurney of the period has been traced to a life that rules him out, which is what leaves Francis's son standing; but the likeliest single answer, on the evidence assembled so far, is that the record which would identify him has not survived. The genealogist Robert Charles Anderson's Great Migration Directory still gives his origin as "Unknown," and that remains the correct entry. The John Gurney case file weighs the whole field.8

In New England, John was a working tradesman rather than a man of property. His land trail ran through a string of grants, leaseholds, and a farm across several towns: lot rights at Weymouth, a forty-five-acre Braintree farm he leased from the merchant William Tyng from 1647 until 1662 — land whose northern fields would, a century later, become the Adams family seat at Quincy and the birthplaces of two presidents15 — a house and orchard of his own that he sold at Braintree in 1661, and a frontier interest among the proprietors of Mendon. Yet his neighbors trusted him: he signed the 1645 petition for the plantation that became Braintree, and in 1659 he both witnessed Gregory Baxter's will and helped appraise the estate — the work given to steady, respected men. His first wife, Mary, died at Braintree in September 1661, and within weeks he married the often-widowed Grizzell Fletcher. He himself died little more than a year later; the inventory of his goods came to £55 14s 6d. The direct line ran on through his son Richard (G12) at Weymouth, even as two other sons, John Jr. and Peter, were lost in the opening violence of King Philip's War.9

Citations

  1. "Notes: Braintree, Mass., Items," New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 62 (January 1908), p. 94, Suffolk Court Files item no. 188, "John Gurney of Brayntree aged 50 Yeares or therea-abouts," dated 17-1-1652/3, Internet Archive. Read strictly this gives a birth about 1602/3; allowing for the period habit of rounding a stated age to the nearest ten, about 1603–1608 is the defensible bracket. This deposition is the only record that attests John's own person rather than his property or office. Source ID: nehgr-62-94. ↩
  2. Suffolk County, Massachusetts, Probate Records, Case #338, John Gurney Senr probate inventory, Braintree, taken at Boston 16 March 1662/3 by Gregory Belcher, Edmund Quincy, and Thomas Faxon; FamilySearch, Suffolk County probate & family court records, 1636–1915, DGS 102840311, images 514 and 516. The amount £55 14s 6d is given in the abstract "Suffolk Wills," New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 12 (1858), p. 53. Source IDs: spr-case-338-john-gurney-probate-1663; nehgr-12-suffolk-wills-1858. ↩
  3. Waldo Chamberlain Sprague, Genealogies of the Families of Braintree, Mass., 1640–1850 (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2001), p. 695, John Gurney entry; Samuel A. Bates, The Ancient Iron Works at Braintree, Mass.: The First in America (South Braintree, Mass.: Frank A. Bates, 1898), p. 10, 12 February 1661 deed styling the grantor "John Gurney, tailor." Source IDs: sprague-braintree; bates-ancient-iron-works-braintree-1898. ↩
  4. Find a Grave, memorial 252975617, John Gurney, Elm Street Cemetery, Braintree, Norfolk County, Massachusetts. The memorial's burial place is a useful lead; its accompanying birth and origin details (a 1615 birth in a modern London borough) are anachronistic and are not followed here. Source ID: findagrave-john-gurney-252975617. ↩
  5. Braintree (Mass.), Records of the Town of Braintree, 1640 to 1793, ed. Samuel A. Bates (Randolph, Mass.: D. H. Huxford, 1886), p. 638, death of Mary Gurney 7th month 20, 1661 (Old Style; 20 September 1661 New Style), Internet Archive; Sprague, Genealogies of the Families of Braintree, p. 695, treating Mary's maiden name as unknown. The "Richards" maiden name appears only in later derivative trees, without primary support. Source IDs: braintree-records-1640-1793-1886; sprague-braintree. ↩
  6. Mary Lovering Holman, "Grissell of the Many Marriages," The American Genealogist, vol. 10, no. 2 (October 1933), pp. 70–73, Internet Archive, giving the marriage at Braintree on 12 November 1661 and Grissell's sequence of husbands (Jewell – Griggs – Kibby – Gurney – Burge); Clarence Almon Torrey, New England Marriages Prior to 1700 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2004), p. 331. The printed Braintree town record, Records of the Town of Braintree (1886), p. 717, enters the corresponding marriage line under a Cheney surname rather than Gurney; the conflict is noted but not resolved here. Source IDs: tag-10-70; torrey-new-england-marriages-prior-1700; braintree-records-1640-1793-1886. ↩
  7. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, vol. 1, 1628–1641 (Boston: William White, 1853), p. 331, June 1641 General Court record remitting the fines of John Gurney, James Ludden, and John Porter for want of gunpowder; History of Weymouth, Massachusetts, 4 vols. (Weymouth, Mass.: Weymouth Historical Society, 1923), vol. 3, p. 251. Source IDs: massachusetts-bay-records-v1-1853; history-of-weymouth. ↩ ↩
  8. The one primary record behind the identification is the marriage of Francis Gurney and Margaret Rybett at St Martin at Palace, Norwich, 23 September 1611 (Norfolk Record Office, PD 12/1), which gives Francis a first wife and so a first family of the right generation; no earlier account of Francis knew of it. Francis's own household at East Dereham is documented on either side of a gap in that parish's register, by the baptisms of Edward on 27 May 1610 and Marye on 25 May 1618 (Norfolk Record Office, PD 86/41). The register's annual returns for 25 March 1611 to 25 March 1616 do not survive and no bound register or diocesan transcript covers those years, so a baptism of a first child of the marriage is permanently unrecoverable. For the emigration corridor, David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), ch. 6. Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Directory, 2nd ed. (Boston: NEHGS, 2025), p. 158, gives the origin as "Unknown." Source IDs: nro-pd-12-1; nro-pd-86-41; fischer-albions-seed-1989; anderson-gmd-2015. ↩ ↩ ↩
  9. Gilbert Nash, Historical Sketch of the Town of Weymouth, Massachusetts, from 1622 to 1884 (Weymouth, Mass.: Town of Weymouth, 1885), pp. 258, 270, 278, 281–282, 306, for the Weymouth lot rights; Thomas F. Temple, Suffolk Deeds. Liber IV (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1888), pp. 6, 89a–90, for the forty-eight Braintree acres occupied "by lease" within the Tyng estate; Bates, Ancient Iron Works at Braintree, p. 10, for the 1661 sale of a house and orchard; The Proprietors' Records of the Town of Mendon, Massachusetts (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1899), pp. 13, 43, 46, 152–153, for the Mendon allotment; estate value per Suffolk Probate Case #338 and NEHGR vol. 12 (1858), p. 53. Source IDs: nash-historical-sketch-weymouth-1885; suffolk-deeds-liber-iv-1888; bates-ancient-iron-works-braintree-1898; mendon-proprietors-records-1899; spr-case-338-john-gurney-probate-1663; nehgr-12-suffolk-wills-1858. ↩ ↩
  10. Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620–1633, vol. 1 (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2012), Gregory Baxter entry, p. 138: John Gurney witnessed Baxter's 1659 will (with Moses Payne and Richard Brackett) and helped take the 7 July 1659 inventory; the 1645 Braintree plantation petition is preserved in the colonial petition record. Source ID: anderson-great-migration-begins-v1-baxter. ↩
  11. Jean Gurney Rigler, The Gurney Family from Aaron to Zuinglius: A Genealogical Dictionary, rev. ed. (Honolulu: J. G. Rigler, 1994), John Gurney-1 children; Sprague, Genealogies of the Families of Braintree, p. 695. John Jr. was among the dead in the Mendon massacre of 14 July 1675, the opening bloodshed of King Philip's War; Peter, "a soldier in Johnson's Co.," was killed in the war in December 1676. Peter's service is recorded at primary level in George Madison Bodge, Soldiers in King Philip's War (Boston: Printed for the Author, 1891), p. 114, which lists "Peeter Gurnay" under Weymouth in Captain Isaac Johnson's company at the Dedham muster of 10 December 1675; he is absent from that company's December 1675 casualty list, consistent with his death later, in 1676. See also the Richard Gurney (G12) fact sheet. Source IDs: bodge-soldiers-king-philips-war-1891; rigler-gurney-family-aaron-zuinglius-1994; sprague-braintree. ↩ ↩ ↩
  12. Sprague, Genealogies of the Families of Braintree, p. 695, listing the children Sarah, Mary, Richard, John, and Peter; History of Weymouth, Massachusetts, vol. 3, p. 251. Sarah is listed first and is otherwise entirely undocumented — she is also absent from Clarence Almon Torrey, New England Marriages Prior to 1700, which would ordinarily catch a daughter who married in the colony. Isaac is a later and uncertain addition, not in the core lists. An Isaac Gurney appears in the Middlesex County court records of 1666 (Cambridge sessions, theft; Blue Hill/Ponkapoag area) and in the Suffolk County court file indexes of June 1667 (warrant for conviction of breaking into a dwelling house; warrant of commitment to prison in Boston signed by Daniel Gookin), located via FamilySearch full-text search of the court-record volumes; the identification with John Gurney's son is highly probable on the uncommon forename, the age, and the place — no other colonial Isaac Gurney is documented in this generation — though no record yet states the parentage. Source IDs: sprague-braintree; history-of-weymouth; familysearch-fulltext-search. ↩ ↩
  13. Frank E. Shedd, Hubert C. Shedd, and J. Gardner Bartlett, Daniel Shed Genealogy: Ancestry and Descendants of Daniel Shed of Braintree, Massachusetts, 1327–1920 (Boston: Shedd Family Association, 1920), Internet Archive; Daniel Shed was baptized 25 June 1620 at Finchingfield, Essex, and married Mary Gurney at Braintree in 1647. Mary's marriage bounds her English birth to before 1628. Source ID: shedd-daniel-shed-genealogy-1920. ↩
  14. See the Richard Gurney (G12) fact sheet; Rigler, Gurney Family from Aaron to Zuinglius, Richard-2 entry, for his Weymouth residence, 1681 Freeman admission, and marriage to Rebecca Taylor. Source ID: rigler-gurney-family-aaron-zuinglius-1994. ↩
  15. National Park Service, Cultural Landscape Report, Adams National Historic Site, Quincy, Massachusetts (1997), pp. 12–13 and fig. 1, "William Tyng's 45-acre farm, Braintree, 1649," drawing on the Ezekiel Sargent manuscripts (Quincy Historical Society, "Land Formerly of William Tyng"): William Tyng leased John Gurney a forty-five-acre Braintree farm in 1647 for ten years, and Gurney continued to lease it from Tyng's daughters Bethia and Mercy until 1662; the northern part of the farm later became the Adams property. The 1653 Tyng inventory of the same land is read as forty-five acres here and as forty-eight in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register vol. 30 (1876), p. 432. npshistory.com. Source ID: nps-adams-nhp. ↩ ↩
  16. Sweeps of every major parish-baptism collection covering Great Britain, run across the full range of Gurney surname spellings, return no Peter Gurney baptism between 1627 and 1647 and no Isaac between 1632 and 1652. Both men first appear in colonial records — Peter in George Madison Bodge, Soldiers in King Philip's War (Boston: Printed for the Author, 1891), p. 114, and Isaac in a Plymouth Colony court order of 1 March 1663/4. Source IDs: findmypast-uk-parish-baptisms; bodge-soldiers-king-philips-war-1891; familysearch-fulltext-search. ↩ ↩