Open question

The departure test has an instrument and has never been run

The natural inversion of the search - which John Gurney household's records stop between 1635 and 1641 without a burial or probate for the head - has been treated as something to do parish by parish. It is not. The parent-name search runs over burials as well as baptisms: a father-John-Gurney sweep for 1625-1635 reports, in one facet panel, 108 parish baptisms, 76 parish burials and 13 parish marriages. Switching the collection to parish burials therefore asks in a single query which children of a John Gurney were buried in England, and the households appearing in the baptism arm but not the burial arm are exactly the departure-shaped gaps. Two mechanics have to be right first: the year parameter in this mode must be the birth-year form, because the plain year parameter renders a filter chip and then returns a silent zero; and the pool excludes some county sets, so the burial arm needs pairing with county-set runs exactly as the baptism arm does. This is the highest-value single query left on the child inventory and it has never been executed - which is the wider point the method was written for: this work has repeatedly gained more from establishing that an instrument said what it appeared to say than from running more searches.

Confidence: Moderate-high

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