These research notes are provided as-is and contain supplementary working research.
Negative result
The Margaret axis, opened and then swept: no Gurney household anywhere pairs a John father with a Margaret mother
Admitting Margaret to the mother axis changed no candidate score, because the axis was then searched and it is empty. Across FreeREG's 585 captured rows, five households carry a Margaret-family mother - Norwich 1638, Bardwell in Suffolk 1643 and 1645, and Mamble and Bayton in Worcestershire 1637 - and none has a father in the John family. Across 705 rows from eight FindMyPast county baptism sets, seven rows carry a Margaret-family mother, to fathers Robert, Edward, Michael and William, and none has a father in the John family at any date. The national cross-collection parent search bounded 1610-1650 returns eight rows for a father John with a mother Margaret, not one of them a genuine Gurney - the surname column reading '?', 'Fosse', 'G...Ds' and 'G?', fuzzy-match noise from Cornwall, Cheshire and Scotland. The negative is interpretable because the identical query shape with mother Mary returns the known Eythorne household and the Westminster Gurley household: the instrument was working when it returned nothing for Margaret.
Search scope
- Searched: FreeREG and FindMyPast — FreeREG parish transcriptions; eight FindMyPast county baptism sets; FindMyPast cross-collection parent search (sid=102)
- Coverage window: 1610 to 1650
- Search: Mother forename in the Margaret family paired with a father in the John family, across the Gurney surname variants, on three instruments: a 585-row FreeREG sweep re-cut for Margaret mothers, a 705-row county-set sweep, and a national parent search with motherfirstname=margaret variant-expanded
- Results reviewed: 1298
- Limitations: FreeREG's surname matching is exact and non-soundex, so its arm depends entirely on the twenty spellings actually queried.; The national parent pool does not reach every county set, which is why the county-set sweep is paired with it.; The county sweep covers eight counties only - Norfolk, Essex, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Middlesex, Westminster and Berkshire - so this is not an England-wide county-set negative.; The national parent search's variant engine is loose, so its eight Margaret rows are fuzzy-match noise rather than Gurney households; the negative rests on reading them, not on the count.
Qualifications and conflicts
- Qualifies Finding Margaret belongs on the mother axis as a substantial soft hit, because the corruption runs both waysThe axis was opened and then found empty, so the correction changed no candidate score.
Sources
- FindMyPast county-level parish index sets — Norfolk, Essex, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Middlesex, Westminster, Berkshire, Herefordshire, Sussex, Warwickshire, Yorkshire and Bedfordshire baptisms, with Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire and Westminster marriages and banns. Authenticated sessions, 29 July and 1 August 2026; retained transcript records from Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Westminster, Berkshire, Essex, Northamptonshire, Middlesex and Bedfordshire., 705 captured rows across Norfolk, Essex, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Middlesex, Westminster and Berkshire against the stems gurn*, gourn*, gorn*, gern*, girn* and garn*, 29 July 2026
- Findmypast UK Parish Baptisms aggregated dataset within Birth, Marriage, Death and Parish Records., sid=102, Great Britain, parish baptisms, father forename John and surname Gurney both variant-expanded, yearofbirth=1630&yearofbirth_offset=20; motherfirstname=margaret expanded returns 8 non-Gurney rows, motherfirstname=mary expanded returns 16 including Eythorne and the Westminster Gurley household
- FreeREG (parish register transcription project). freereg.org.uk., Sweep of 28 July 2026, 585 captured rows across the Gurney surname family, re-cut for Margaret-family mothers on 29 July 2026
Topic file location: Identity — the shape, the matrix, and the two families
Technical details
- Research item:
G13-RI-000226 - Graph revision:
381 - Machine-readable JSON:
/assets/g13-graph/findings/G13-RI-000226.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.