Analysis

The identification is open: every rival was tested rather than assumed, and the field did not converge

John Gurney's parentage is not settled. No record made in his lifetime names his father, and the elimination exercise that removed his rivals did not converge on a replacement. Two things the exercise did establish are solid. Every named rival was actively tested rather than left unexamined — Candidate A resolved into two men and both traced to continuing English lives; Candidate D held rather than closed on a 1662 London hearth-tax entry made in the year the colonial John lay dying; the Earsham testator eliminated by dying in England in 1638 with a son still a minor; the 1636 Newgate apprentice separated on family status and an unbendable chronology; and the elder Berkhamsted John eliminated on his own age. And the colonial record shows exactly one adult Gurney household in Massachusetts before 1660: the Dorchester Gurneys are Gurnells, the Providence John and Sarah are a later unconnected pair, and there is no second emigrant John. What the exercise also established is that eliminating men does not identify one. The candidates fall into two disjoint groups — documented households with the wrong shape, and documented men with no household at all — and no candidate is in both. That is the strongest structural argument in the file that the man's own baptism and his household's baptisms are not in the same searchable place.

Confidence: Moderate-high

Topic file location: Identity — assessment