Analysis

What Candidate B rests on, and the offsets that hold it to a minority share

Four threads tie John to Francis's household and none is a document naming him a son: a trade that ran father to son but through no surviving indenture; the East Anglia-to-London corridor that sent roughly three in five Massachusetts Bay emigrants of the 1630s and under one in ten from London proper; the 1634 liquidation that left an adult elder son nothing to inherit; and the Gurney and Rivett kin near the parish. Against them stand offsets that have grown rather than shrunk. Francis's own London apprenticeship barred a legitimate child before mid-1606, while the 1653 deposition reads about 1602/3 strictly or about 1603-1608 with age-rounding allowed, so Candidate B can occupy only the 1606-1608 overlap — and every year of it still falls three to five years before the 1611 marriage, with no earlier Francis Gurney marriage found across five instruments. John named no child Francis, in the slot the naming custom most governs. No English marriage and no English child baptism of his own has been found on any of five instruments. Both formal trade-admission registers return documented negatives. And the structural point is a symmetry rather than an advantage: Candidate B has an English-side corridor with no Gurney at the colonial end, while the Buckinghamshire candidates have a colonial-side reception channel with no Gurney at the English end. Neither side has the middle link.

Confidence: Moderate

Topic file location: Identity — Candidate B: Norfolk parentage