These research notes are provided as-is and contain supplementary working research.
Negative result
An expert entry-level walk of the entire surviving East Dereham court book for 1623-1635 found the 3 April 1627 Margery-Gurney abuttal to be the only secure Gurney occurrence - no Gurney admission, surrender, presentment, or homage appearance, and no Rivett or Podmer form anywhere in the book. In John's own boyhood the family's connection to the manor was a remembered parcel, not an active tenancy, and no Rivett fostering household held East Dereham copyhold.
Search scope
- Searched: FamilySearch films (expert image walk) + FamilySearch Full-Text Search index probes — East Dereham manor court books 1623-1689, DGS 004389483 (film shared with Deopham and Denver material)
- Coverage window: 1623 to 1635
- Search: Entry-level target-name walk of every staged leaf (idx1505-idx1624, the full 1623-1635 East Dereham book plus interleaved front matter) for Gurney/Gurner/Gurnay/Gournay and the orbit names Rivett/Ryvett, Podmer/Petman, Elwyn, Blomefield, across headings, margins, homage and jury lists, presentments, admissions, surrenders, fines, and abuttals; corroborated by film-scoped full-text probes (rivet*, ryvet*, podm* = 0 film-wide with a common-token coverage control; no gurn* token dated 1623-1630).
- Results reviewed: 120
- Limitations: Paleographic visual negative for the target surname forms, not a full diplomatic transcript; some leaves are faint, crossed, or obscured by bleed-through.; Covers the 1623-1635 book; the 1636-1689 remainder of the volume was not walked (the 10 October 1636 abuttal was read separately).; Latin court-hand full-text extraction on the film is thin, so the index probes are corroborative only.; Possible Rivet-like forms in the 1626-1630 vicinity were noted by the reader but were not clean enough to promote.
Qualifications and conflicts
- Qualifies Finding A Gurney copyhold household existed at East Dereham before Francis Gurney's residence years: the widow Margery Gurney, whose will was proved in the archdeaconry court in 1602-03 and whose former Ellingfield tenancy the manor courts still recited in 1627 and 1636. An established Gurney presence in John's birth parish therefore predates his c. 1609/10 baptism by a generation, though by his boyhood it survived only as a parcel memory.By 1623-1635 the Gurney presence was a remembered parcel only - no active tenancy survived into John's boyhood.
Sources
- East Dereham (the Queen's manor, East Dereham with members; NRO DC 12/5), manorial court books 1623-1852 with index 1623-1820; originals at the Norfolk Record Office. FamilySearch films: DGS 004389483 ('Dereham, Norfolk. Court Records 1623-1689,' bundled with Deopham and Denver material) and DGS 004389277 ('Court Records 1689-1820,' with the manor index at item 8)., DGS 004389483, packet-53 expert walk, images idx1505-idx1624 (report: sources/corpus_supplement/paleo-2026-07-packet-53-east-dereham-courts-1623-1635.md)
Topic file location: Identity — Candidate B: Norfolk parentage
Technical details
- Research item:
G13-RI-000208 - Graph revision:
381 - Machine-readable JSON:
/assets/g13-graph/findings/G13-RI-000208.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.