These research notes are provided as-is and contain supplementary working research.
Analysis
Shared matching-criteria profile: tailor, wife Mary, three English-born children, birth c.1602–1608, gone from England by 1641
Any English candidate for the Braintree emigrant must satisfy one shared profile drawn from his colonial baseline: a tailor by trade; married to a wife named Mary; father in England of Mary, Richard and John Jr., with Sarah possible; born in England about 1602-1608, read off his own 1652/3 age deposition; and gone from the English record by the time he first appears in Massachusetts in June 1641. Peter and Isaac are excluded from the English child test — neither has a baptism anywhere in Britain and both were almost certainly born in New England — so a candidate household is tested against three named English children rather than five. A settled Puritan household is a soft fifth criterion. This whole profile, not a bare surname match, is the shared test applied to every alternative candidate.
Why this conclusion
- Synthesizes Finding Arrival window: 1636–early 1641The 1638-early-1641 arrival window bounds the 'gone from English records by c.1641' strand of the profile.
- Synthesizes Finding Occupation: a tailor by trade, a husbandman by economyThe occupation finding (a tailor by trade) is one strand of the shared matching-criteria profile.
- Synthesizes Finding First wife Mary (maiden name unknown), m. England by mid-1620s, d. Braintree 20 Sep 1661The first-wife-Mary finding is one strand of the shared matching-criteria profile.
- Synthesizes Finding Reconstructed family group: Mary, Richard and John Jr. English-born, Sarah doubtful, Peter and Isaac American-bornThe reconstructed five-child roster is one strand of the shared matching-criteria profile.
- Synthesizes Finding Born c.1602-1610 (probably c.1603-08)The c.1602-1610 birth-window finding is one strand of the shared matching-criteria profile.
- Required by Analysis The elimination scaffold: structural grounds, not a blanket same-surname suspicionThe elimination scaffold has no content unless there is a profile to test candidates against.
- Synthesized by Finding Candidate landscape: the sweep leaves no survivor, and the leading rows are record-states rather than menThe candidate-landscape outcome is the result of applying the matching-criteria profile.
Appears in
- John Gurney identity case file — Section 1, 'What a candidate has to account for', sets out the shared profile every English candidate must fit.
Topic file location: Identity — candidate overview
Technical details
- Research item:
G13-RI-000104 - Graph revision:
381 - Machine-readable JSON:
/assets/g13-graph/findings/G13-RI-000104.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.