These research notes are provided as-is and contain supplementary working research.
Analysis
Passenger silence is expected in the 1639-41 Great-Migration tail
The absence of a passenger record for John's crossing is what Great-Migration timing predicts. His arrival is bounded to 1638-early 1641, the tail of a migration that crested in 1638 and fell off sharply after 1640; and named Boston-area passenger lists survive far worse for 1639-mid-1641 - the window most likely to hold his crossing - than for the earlier peak years, the surviving evidence there being ship-arrival notices and clearance licences with passenger counts but no names. A man arriving then would very often leave no listed name even under perfect record-keeping, so his absence from the surviving lists is the expected outcome of poor list survival, not evidence about his party or origin.
Why this conclusion
- Depends on Finding Arrival window: 1638–early 1641The timing reading rests on the arrival window (1638-early 1641) fixed in the arrival-chronology unit.
Qualifications and conflicts
- Qualified by Negative result The London port-emigration lists and the livery-company registers, searched for John Gurney's crossing and trade, return no emigrant John Gurney. Hotten's Original Lists (behind them TNA E 157/20) hold no Gurney passenger in any spelling; a ROLLCO all-company livery sweep finds no East-Anglian Gurney apprentice, the sole provincial tailoring-Gurney being the eliminated Buckinghamshire Candidate-A family.Hotten and the underlying port-list pathway add another negative passenger-list check, reinforcing that the passenger silence is expected record survival rather than evidence against migration in the 1638-early-1641 window.
- Qualifies Negative result No Gurney on the near-window Boston-area passenger listsGreat-Migration timing explains the passenger-list negative: the 1639-41 crossing window is exactly when named lists survive worst.
Sources
- Banks, Charles Edward. The Planters of the Commonwealth: A Study of the Emigrants and Emigration in Colonial Times, to Which Are Added Lists of Passengers to Boston and to the Bay Colony, the Ships Which Brought Them, Their English Homes, and the Places of Their Settlement in Massachusetts, 1620–1640. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930., Planters of the Commonwealth (1930) - the 1638 peak lists and the thin 1639-1641 ship record
- Drake, Samuel G. Result of Some Researches among the British Archives for Information Relative to the Founders of New England, Made in the Years 1858, 1859, and 1860. Boston: New England Historic-Genealogical Society, 1860 (reprinted from the New England Historical and Genealogical Register)., Result of Some Researches (1860); passenger-list survival by year, compiled in the passenger-list topic §6
Topic file location: Origin — migration and reception network
Technical details
- Research item:
G13-RI-000089 - Graph revision:
244 - Machine-readable JSON:
/assets/g13-graph/findings/G13-RI-000089.json
This is one research item from the John Gurney research graph; the fuller narrative treatment is in the linked topic above and the research library.