These research notes are provided as-is and contain supplementary working research.
This page expands an Evidence link in Research-state open questions: the findings, sources, and qualifications behind the marked passage.
Open question
Open question: first wife Mary's identity and English marriage
The identity of John Gurney's first wife Mary — her maiden name and the place and date of their English marriage — is unrecovered. The 'Richards' surname carried in derivative online trees is unverified. The marriage is bounded to England before 1628 (their daughter Mary married Daniel Shed at Braintree in 1647, so was born by 1631), yet no John Gurney x Mary marriage is indexed in eastern-England collections 1620-1635 outside the eliminated Eythorne, Kent event; the absence best reads as a parish-register coverage gap rather than an out-of-England or absent marriage. A Peter among Mary's kin would explain the otherwise-anomalous naming of John's son Peter.
Why this conclusion
- Synthesized by Analysis Analysis: the open program reconciled to the leads catalogueThe reconciliation synthesizes the first-wife identity/marriage question as a standing question of the open program.
Qualifications and conflicts
- Qualified by Negative result The English probate courts and Norfolk parish/marriage indexes, searched for any record naming the emigrant, his father Francis, or his family, return no positive match. No Francis Gurney G14 will survives in the Commissary, Archdeaconry, Prerogative, or Norwich courts; the two Rattlesden Rivett wills name no Margaret and no Gurney; and the Norfolk parish and same-name indexes yield no John-son-of-Francis baptism and no matching household for John or his wife Mary.The Norfolk parish and marriage negative bears directly on the first-wife question by finding no matching John Gurney and Mary marriage or household in the searched English collections.
Related context
- Context from Analysis The Peter naming gap points to Mary's kin, not the Gurney lineThe Peter naming gap is a concrete reason the first-wife identity question matters: Mary's kin most likely carried the name.
Technical details
- Evidence marker:
G13-PM-000034 - Primary research item:
G13-RI-000055 - Graph revision:
244 - Machine-readable JSON:
/assets/g13-graph/marker-bundles/G13-PM-000034.json