These research notes are provided as-is and contain supplementary working research.
Negative result
The head's missing burial falls inside a documented Hertfordshire register defect and is not evidence
No John Gurney-variant burial occurs at Great Berkhamsted after 1620, and none anywhere in Hertfordshire between 1620 and 1690 except Jonathan Gurney at Bovingdon in 1682-3. That absence cannot be read as departure. The record set's own description states that many Hertfordshire registers are 'sadly defective during the Civil War and Commonwealth period (1643-1660)', and the Berkhamsted Gurney burials stop in 1643 and do not resume until 1711 - the signature of that defect rather than of an empty parish. Coverage statement, so this is not re-run as a search: the burial set covers Berkhamsted across 1583-1660 and again from 1711, and any Berkhamsted burial negative for 1644-1660 falls inside a known defect and is not evidence. A head of household who died in that window would be invisible.
Search scope
- Searched: FindMyPast — Hertfordshire Burials (Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies)
- Coverage window: 1620 to 1690
- Search: firstname=jhon*&lastname=gourn* county-wide with no place filter, and firstname=jo*&lastname=gurney&yearofdeath=1650&yearofdeath_offset=40
- Results reviewed: 5
- Limitations: The record set's own description states that many Hertfordshire registers are defective for 1643-1660, and Berkhamsted's Gurney burials stop in 1643 and resume only in 1711.; Any Berkhamsted burial negative for 1644-1660 therefore falls inside a known defect and is not evidence.; Both the jhon* and jo* stems are required because jo* does not match the seventeenth-century spelling Jhon; other forename spellings were not exhaustively tested.
Qualifications and conflicts
- Conflicts with Finding C(ii)'s household stopped because his children were dying, not because he leftThe household stops for a documented reason, while the head's own absence remains uninterpretable inside the register defect; the two must be read together rather than merged.
Sources
- Hertfordshire Burials, parish-register burial records and images, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies; served via Findmypast. Great Berkhamsted, 28 June 1638 burial entry on viewer page 165 of 175, record GBPRS/HERT/007567815/00277., firstname=jhon*&lastname=gourn* county-wide (2 rows, Berkhamstead 1612 and 1620) and firstname=jo*&lastname=gurney&yearofdeath=1650&yearofdeath_offset=40 (3 rows); record-set description read 28 July 2026
Appears in
- John Gurney identity case file — Section 8.2's closing paragraph: the head has no recorded burial after 1620, and the record set states that many Hertfordshire registers are defective for 1643-1660.
Topic file location: Identity — Berkhamsted: Candidates C(i) and C(ii)
Technical details
- Research item:
G13-RI-000217 - Graph revision:
381 - Machine-readable JSON:
/assets/g13-graph/findings/G13-RI-000217.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.