Gurney Genealogy Library Updated 15 July 2026 by Allen Gurney

These research notes are provided as-is and contain supplementary working research.

Family — Mendon: John Jr. and Ruth Bundy

Two of John Gurney’s sons carried the family into the opening violence of King Philip’s War. John Jr. had settled at Mendon by the early 1670s with his wife Ruth and their children John, Samuel, and Mary; he was among the dead when Nipmuc fighters struck the town on 14 July 1675, and Ruth remarried within six months. Peter, a soldier in Captain Isaac Johnson’s company, survived the Great Swamp Fight that December and was killed later in the war, in 1676. A separate, once-confused thread is now resolved: the 1675 Mendon casualty is John Jr., not the identically-named eldest son of his brother Richard (G12), who was still living in 1691. And the post-1667 Mendon proprietors’ records preserve two Gurney lot-holders working through the same generation — John Jr. in his own right, and his father’s widow, Grisel, in hers.

The Mendon household: John Jr. and Ruth

John Gurney Jr. — old enough by 1661 to witness his father’s Braintree deed — had moved on to the newer inland plantation of Mendon by the early 1670s.[1] The clearest primary trace of his household there is a birth entry in the Mendon town book: “Samuel son of John & Ruth Gurney — born March 14, 1671,” fixing his wife’s name and giving the household a third child alongside John and Mary.[2] Torrey’s marriage compendium independently carries the same household at compendium level, dating the marriage to about 1671/2 and naming all three children.[3]

John did not long survive the birth of that son. He was among the dead when Nipmuc forces struck Mendon on 14 July 1675, the opening bloodshed of King Philip’s War.[4] His widow Ruth remarried quickly, as was common for a woman left with young children on an exposed frontier: the Plymouth Colony court’s printed record of town returns carries the Taunton entry verbatim — “John Bundey married to Ruth Surney, of Mendum, this 9th of January, 1676” — and the Taunton town’s own vital records repeat the marriage under two more spellings, “Ruth Garney [Gurney] of Mendun,” with an explicit editorial cross-reference tying both forms to “Ruth Gurney.”[5][6] Charles Henry Pope’s 1900 compilation of Massachusetts founders records the same marriage under the bride’s name “Jane Gurney of Mendon” — an error: no primary record anywhere gives Ruth’s household a Jane, and the two Plymouth-area sources that do survive, independently phrased, both give Ruth.[7] Evidence

Which John died at Mendon

For a time the 1675 Mendon casualty could be read as either of two identically-named first cousins — John Jr., son of the emigrant John Gurney-1, or his own nephew John, eldest son of Richard Gurney (G12) of Weymouth. The question is now settled, and by a record outside this household entirely: on 27 October 1691 the Suffolk County Court at Boston granted administration of Richard Gurney’s estate to two of his sons, “Zechoriah Gurney & Richard Gurney, … John Gurney the Eldest son refusing to administer.” Richard’s own son John was therefore alive sixteen years after the Mendon massacre and simply declined the duty of administrator — he cannot be the 1675 casualty. The dead man at Mendon was John Jr., G13’s own son, and the Mendon town book’s John-and-Ruth household is his.[8] The fuller transcription and consequences of that 1691 record for Richard’s own line are on the G12 companion. Evidence

Two Gurney lots at Mendon, a generation apart

Mendon was not incorporated until 15 May 1667, four years after John Sr.‘s death, so every entry in its own proprietors’ records postdates him. Two Gurneys appear there in their own right, not his. John Gurny — matching John Jr., the actual Mendon resident — held a twenty-acre house lot from the town’s earliest purchaser list; his lot, meadow, and swamp rights recur for decades afterward as a fixed boundary marker in his neighbors’ land descriptions, and the lot itself was finally sold out of the family on 3 May 1692, to Josiah Thayer.[9] Grisel Gurney — John Sr.'s widow, remembered elsewhere by her maiden name Fletcher and her earlier husbands Jewell, Griggs, and Kibby — held a separate twenty-acre lot in her own name, and a copy of her will, returned to the town through guardians in Chelmsford, shows she had by then become “the Abouesd John Burge['s]” wife: she left her Mendon accommodation to her son Joseph Juell, with payments due to Nathanil Juell, Mercy Juell, and Sherabiah Keby.[10] The record therefore preserves the same two lines the family’s own history already established — the son who actually lived and died at Mendon, and the widow who outlived her Braintree husband and carried her own Mendon holding into a fifth marriage and a stepson’s inheritance.[11] Evidence

Peter’s war

John’s youngest documented son, Peter, was a soldier rather than a settler in this generation’s encounter with the war. George Madison Bodge’s roll of King Philip’s War soldiers lists “Peeter Gurnay” under Weymouth in Captain Isaac Johnson’s company, mustered at Dedham on 10 December 1675 for the Narragansett campaign — the same company in which Johnson himself was killed leading his men across the log bridge into the Narragansett fort on 19 December 1675.[12] Peter is absent from that company’s list of the Fort Fight’s December 1675 dead and wounded, so he survived it; he was killed later in the war, in 1676, the same year Ruth remarried out of Mendon.[4] Evidence

Samuel’s likely Boston marriage, 1693

A Samuel Gurney married Sarah Shapley at Boston on 26 October 1693 — the only Gurney of any generation anywhere in the printed Boston vital records, thirty years after John Sr.'s death.[13] No record names this Samuel’s father, but the Mendon household’s own third child was a Samuel, born 14 March 1671, who would have been twenty-two in 1693 — an ordinary marrying age — and no other Samuel Gurney appears anywhere in the surviving colonial-era record to compete for the identification. The match is chronologically clean and, on the printed record alone, unopposed, but it rests on age and the absence of a rival rather than any document naming the connection outright, so it stays a probable, not a proven, identification of this household’s own son.[13] Evidence

Two open threads

Two leads point past this household without yet reaching it. The 1699 will of John Lewis of Nevis, a merchant, names “Mary Gurney the daughter of John Gurney” among legatees tied to a New England-and-Bristol merchant circle around the Lloyd family.[14] A legatee’s father need not be living, so John Jr.'s 1675 death is no obstacle to Mary being his daughter — but no record yet confirms which John Gurney the will means, and the identification stays an open lead rather than a finding. Separately, Taunton’s own marriage records carry a Timothy Cooper marrying an Elizabeth Gurney there on 16 October 1706, three decades after Ruth’s household arrived in the town as the Bundy family — an unplaced possible child or grandchild of John Jr. and Ruth, carried to Taunton in Ruth’s remarried household, but not yet connected to it by any record.[15] Evidence

  1. John Gurney’s 1661/2 conveyance to Richard Thayer was witnessed by Peter Brackett and John Rockwell, not by a son; John Jr.'s standing as an adult by the early 1660s rests instead on the ordinary chronology of a son old enough to marry and hold land in his own right by the early 1670s. See the family roster in the family-group unit, G13-RI-000065. ↩︎

  2. Mendon, Massachusetts, town records (manuscript births), read via FamilySearch full-text search: “Samuel son of John & Ruth Gurney — born March 14, 1671.” Source ID: familysearch-fulltext-search. ↩︎

  3. Clarence Almon Torrey, New England Marriages Prior to 1700 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2004), p. 331, third Gurney line: “John" (-1675?) & Ruth ?Retchell, m/2 John Bundy 1676, m/3 Guydo Bailey; b 1671(2?); Menden (had John, Samuel, Mary).” Source ID: torrey-new-england-marriages-prior-1700. ↩︎

  4. Waldo Chamberlain Sprague, Genealogies of the Families of Braintree, Mass., 1640–1850 (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2001), p. 695; Jean Gurney Rigler, The Gurney Family from Aaron to Zuinglius: A Genealogical Dictionary, rev. ed. (Honolulu: J. G. Rigler, 1994), John Gurney-1 children entry: both place John Jr. among the dead at the Mendon massacre of 14 July 1675 and Peter as a soldier in Johnson’s company killed in the war in 1676. Source IDs: sprague-braintree; rigler-gurney-family-aaron-zuinglius-1994. ↩︎ ↩︎

  5. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff and David Pulsifer, eds., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, vol. 8 (Boston: Press of William White, 1857), Taunton town return (printed p. ~60): “John Bundey married to Ruth Surney, of Mendum, this 9th of January, 1676.” Source ID: plymouth-colony-records-vol8-shurtleff-pulsifer-1857. ↩︎

  6. Vital Records of Taunton, Massachusetts, to the Year 1850, vol. 2 (Marriages) (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1928): “BUNDY, John [dup. and t.p.r. John Bundy] and Ruth Garney [dup. and T.P.R. Gurney] of Mendun, Jan. 9, 1676. [John Bundey and Ruth Surney of Mendun, P.C.R.],” with the volume’s own cross-references “GARNEY (see Gurney)” and “SURNEY, Ruth (see Ruth Gurney).” Source ID: taunton-vital-records-to-1850-vol2-marriages-1928. ↩︎

  7. Charles Henry Pope, The Pioneers of Massachusetts (Boston: Charles H. Pope, 1900), BUNDY entry: John Bundy, wife Martha d. 1 May 1674, “he m. 9 Jan. 1676, Jane Gurney of Mendon.” Weighed against the Plymouth Colony court return and the Taunton town record, both independently naming Ruth, Pope’s “Jane” reads as his own error rather than a second marriage. Source ID: pope-pioneers-of-massachusetts-1900. ↩︎

  8. Suffolk County, Massachusetts, Probate Records 1636–1766 (registry copy volume), image 448 of 585, FamilySearch ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-C9Y5-GKGB, administration entry for Richard Gurney late of Weymouth, County Court at Boston, 27 October 1691: “Full Power to administer all & singular the Goods, Chattels, rights & Creditts of the Estate of Richard Gurney late of Waymouth decd intestate is granted unto Zechoriah Gurney & Richard Gurney two of the Sonnes of the decd, John Gurney the Eldest son refusing to administer.” Source ID: familysearch-fulltext-search. ↩︎

  9. The Proprietors’ Records of the Town of Mendon, Massachusetts: Incorporated May 15, 1667 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill Press, 1899), p. 13 (“John Gurny, a twenty acre lot”), pp. 152–153 (the lot’s chain of title: “John Gurnys twenty Acre House Lott Now Josiah Thayers As Appears by A Deed of Sale baring Date the third Day of May one thousand six hundred Ninty and two”), with recurring abutter references to “John Gurnys medow,” “house Lott,” and “swampp Lott” on pp. 29, 84, 109, 159, 185, 211, 340–341, 346, 350, 373, 462. Source ID: mendon-proprietors-records-1899. ↩︎

  10. The Proprietors’ Records of the Town of Mendon, Massachusetts (1899), p. 13 (“Grisel Gurney, a twenty acre lot”), p. 43 (“A Coppy of the Will of Grisell Gurny,” returned by guardians William Fletcher and John Burge of Chelmsford for “the Child of the Widdow Gurny that Was And Last of all Wife to the Abouesd John Burge,” willing her Mendon accommodation to “her son Joseph Juell” with payments due Nathanil Juell, Mercy Juell, and Sherabiah Keby), p. 46 (the lot’s chain of title from Grisel to Joseph Juell to Josiah Chapin), p. 463 (“Grizel Gurneys 20 acre Lott”). Source ID: mendon-proprietors-records-1899. ↩︎

  11. Grizzell’s identity, maiden name Fletcher, and husband sequence Jewell–Griggs–Kibby–Gurney–Burge are established with their own sources in the wives-and-marriages unit, G13-RI-000062. ↩︎

  12. George Madison Bodge, Soldiers in King Philip’s War (Boston: Printed for the Author, 1891), p. 114 (Captain Isaac Johnson’s company, Weymouth file, “Peeter Gurnay”; Dedham muster 10 December 1675), with the company narrative and December 1675 casualty list at pp. 112–114. Source ID: bodge-soldiers-king-philips-war-1891. ↩︎

  13. A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, Containing Boston Marriages from 1700 to 1751 [Ninth Report] (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1883), p. 210: Samuel Gurney and Sarah Shapley, married 26 October 1693. This is the same record already carried, at record-coverage level, as G13-RI-000181 in the colonial record-coverage unit; the identification with this household’s own Samuel (born 14 March 1671, see above) is proposed here for the first time and is not asserted there. Source ID: boston-record-commissioners-ninth-report-1883. ↩︎ ↩︎

  14. Will of John Lewis of the Island of Nevis, merchant, made 21 December 1699, proved 9 July 1701 (Prerogative Court of Canterbury register Dyer, quire 99 = TNA PROB 11/461), abstracted in Henry F. Waters, “Genealogical Gleanings in England,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 49 (1895): names “Mary Gurney the daughter of John Gurney” among legatees alongside kinswoman Grisell Lloyd, daughter of James Lloyd of New England, and Henry Lloyd of Bristol as sole executor. Source ID: nehgr-49-genealogical-gleanings-john-lewis. ↩︎

  15. Vital Records of Taunton, Massachusetts, to the Year 1850, vol. 2 (Marriages) (1928): “GURNEY (Garney), Elizabeth and Timothy Cooper,” 16 October 1706. Source ID: taunton-vital-records-to-1850-vol2-marriages-1928. ↩︎