These research notes are provided as-is and contain supplementary working research.
This page expands an Evidence link in Identity — Berkhamsted: Candidates C(i) and C(ii): the findings, sources, and qualifications behind the marked passage.
Evidence
Great Berkhamsted held four contemporaneous Gurney households, distinguished by the father's forename
Read whole rather than by child, the Great Berkhamsted baptism corpus carries four contemporaneous Gurney households in the emigration window, distinguished by the father's forename: John/Jhon (twelve children 1597-1637); Thomas (John 1588, Eliz 1591, Willm 1594, Thomas 1604, Nicolas 1607, Richarde 1635, Thomas 1638, Thomas 1640, mother Elizabeth); Edward/Edwarde (James 1603, Elisabeth 1606, Susanna 1611); and William/Willyam (Anna/Anne 1594, Willyam 1632). That governs how the parish's burials may be read: they cannot be assigned wholesale to the John line, and the Thomas household was actively baptising in 1638 and 1640. The parish attribution itself is settled - FindMyPast indexes the family at Great Berkhampstead and FamilySearch indexes the same children at St Peter, Hertfordshire, and St Peter's is Berkhamsted's own parish church, so the two labels name one place.
Why this conclusion
- Required by Open question The 28 June 1638 Richard Gurney burial: three readings, and only the register image discriminatesOnly the four-household reading of the parish keeps the 1635 Thomas-household Richard in play as an alternative reading of the 1638 burial.
Sources
- Hertfordshire Baptisms, parish-register baptism records, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies; served via Findmypast., lastname=gurn*&keywords=berkhamstead (19 rows) and lastname=gourn*&keywords=berkhamstead (18 rows), read with the Father's and Mother's first-name columns; authenticated session 28 July 2026
- Findmypast UK Parish Baptisms aggregated dataset within Birth, Marriage, Death and Parish Records., sid=102 parent search, fatherfirstname=john variant-expanded, fatherlastname=gurney variant-expanded, keywords=berkhampstead; 22 parish-baptism rows, 20 read, 28 July 2026
Appears in
- John Gurney identity case file — Section 8.2 states that the parish held four contemporaneous Gurney households, fathers John, Thomas, Edward and William.
Topic file location: Identity — Berkhamsted: Candidates C(i) and C(ii)
Technical details
- Evidence marker:
G13-PM-000135 - Primary research item:
G13-RI-000211 - Graph revision:
381 - Machine-readable JSON:
/assets/g13-graph/marker-bundles/G13-PM-000135.json