Finding

Name variants are a weighted scale attaching to the record, never a class of surnames to exclude

Surname and forename variants sit on a sliding scale of plausibility, and the weight attaches to the individual record rather than to the spelling as a category. Gurney, Gurny, Gurnie, Gourney, Gourny and Gurnay carry full weight as the family's own habitual orthography; Gurne, Gurn, Gourne and Gurnoe carry full weight as the commonest clerk's contraction, a dropped terminal letter; Gurnard and Gurnat carry moderate-to-high weight as a documented alias; Gorne, Garne, Gernne, Gowrne and Girney are ordinary vowel drift in secretary-hand transcription; Gurnett, Gurnel, Gurnell and Gurner are recognised surnames in their own right and rate lower - but lower is never exclusion; and H-initial forms are warranted for discovery only, by a proven indexer confusion of capital H and G. Gurnard has formal standing rather than being a transcription slip: the Heralds' Visitation of London of 1634 records letters patent exemplified by Garter King of Arms on 26 July 1633 to 'Richard Gurny, alias Gurnard, Sheriff of London', and on the same pedigree 'Burton Gurny, alias Gurnard, descended from the Gurneys of Kendall' - a heraldically registered family using both forms interchangeably, in London, in the emigrant's own decade. The reason is not obscure: the Norfolk line's own crest, from before 1465, is a gurnard fish in pale, a canting pun on the surname. The practical consequence is that a low-weight surname form on a record matching a corner of the colonial shape is worth more than a high-weight form on one that does not, and that what settles a variant question is the register image and the hand rather than an index row or a later century's settled spelling.

Confidence: High

Topic file location: Identity — Other Eliminations and Earsham