Analysis

The scoring rubric, and the six rules that govern how it is applied

Candidate households are scored against the colonial signature - children Mary (a hard bound, born by 1631), Richard (about 1630, compiled) and John Jr. (about 1633, compiled); a wife Mary married by about 1630 and living to 1661; a father born about 1598-1608 and gone from England 1637-41 - on a points rubric that rewards each named child present, each child's baptism within two or five years of expectation, and the preserved birth order Mary then Richard then John; that grades the mother token from Mary at full weight through the Margaret family as a substantial soft hit to Margery as partial; that rewards a father in the John family and a father's implied birth year inside the band; that rewards a last record falling 1635-41 in a parish whose burials are demonstrably covered; and that penalises a violated birth order, a demonstrably continuing English household, each additional child with a non-colonial forename, and - as an effective elimination - an English burial or probate for the head after 1641. Six rules govern its application. Mary's date is a primary bound and the other two are not. The Mary and Margaret forms are a weighted scale rather than a filter, and Molly and Polly stay excluded as anachronistic. The John family on the father axis includes an indexed Jone or Joan, which in these sets is a contracted or Latin Johannes rather than a woman. An undated role row is never scored as an in-window household until it has been dated on a second instrument. Peter, Isaac and Sarah are not scored against a candidate at all. And a non-John father is a flag rather than a verdict, since an indexer has already been shown to misread a capital H as G, so any household scoring six or more on the child signals alone has its father's forename checked against the image regardless of the index.

Confidence: High

Topic file location: Identity — method for a complete child inventory