Finding

Candidate landscape: the sweep leaves no survivor, and the leading rows are record-states rather than men

Applying the shared matching-criteria profile and the elimination scaffold across the full record sweep does not leave one survivor. Of the same-name English John Gurney households the sweeps surfaced, the great majority are eliminated on structural grounds — continuing English residence past 1641, a wife who is not Mary, a child set that cannot be made to fit, or a documented death in England. Two limits stop the exercise converging on a name. A household attested by a single indexed event cannot be hard-eliminated, since one record cannot rule out an unrecorded emigration the way a continuing English record can, so several are held at a low residual. And counting households is not counting men: every household tested for that defect has resolved into more than one man — Candidate A into two, Stewkley into two, Berkhamsted into a father and a son inside a parish of four contemporaneous Gurney households. The resulting distribution has no option above about 22 percent, and its three leading rows describe the state of the record rather than a person. Candidate B remains the leading named candidate at about 11 percent. The household-by-household enumeration of the cleared field is published in the identity case file at sections 8.7 and 8.8, cross-referenced as the master list rather than replicated here.

Confidence: Moderate-high

Topic file location: Identity — candidate overview