These research notes are provided as-is and contain supplementary working research.
This page expands an Evidence link in Colonial Braintree community: the findings, sources, and qualifications behind the marked passage.
Finding
Occupation: a tailor by trade, a husbandman by economy
John Gurney's trade was tailoring — he is styled 'John Gurney, tailor' in his own 12 February 1661/2 Braintree deed, and Sprague's compiled Braintree genealogy likewise enters him as a tailor — but the working economy of his last years was a husbandman's: his March 1663 estate inventory held no tool of the tailoring trade and its value lay in livestock, plough-gear, and grain. His occupation is best read as a trained trade overtaken in practice by mixed farming: a tailor by name, a husbandman by the measure of his goods.
Why this conclusion
- Depends on Finding Finding: estate wealth concentrated in livestock and the working farmThe livestock-and-husbandry profile of the estate (the material-life husbandry finding) is the farming economy that overtook the trade in practice.
- Depends on Negative result Negative: no tailoring tools or cloth in the estateThe 1663 inventory's absence of any tailoring tool (the material-life negative) qualifies how central the needle remained to his late-life economy.
- Required by Analysis John's trade points back to a Norfolk textile familyThe orientation rests on the colonial occupation fact - that John was a tailor - whose canonical home is the Braintree-community unit.
- Synthesized by Analysis Shared matching-criteria profile: tailor, wife Mary, five named children, birth c.1602–1610, gone from England by 1641The occupation finding (a tailor by trade) is one strand of the shared matching-criteria profile.
- Depends on Evidence 1661/2 Gurney–Thayer deed ('John Gurney, tailor')The 12 February 1661/2 deed styling 'John Gurney, tailor' is the direct documentary evidence of the trade.
- Required by Finding John's tailoring learned off the enrolled books (informal/country training)Reasons from the established colonial occupation fact (John a tailor by trade), whose canonical home is g13-colonial-braintree-community.
Sources
- Sprague, Waldo Chamberlain. Genealogies of the Families of Braintree, Mass., 1640–1850. Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2001.
Technical details
- Evidence marker:
G13-PM-000029 - Primary research item:
G13-RI-000047 - Graph revision:
244 - Machine-readable JSON:
/assets/g13-graph/marker-bundles/G13-PM-000029.json