Gurney Genealogy Library Updated 4 August 2026 by Allen Gurney

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

Identity — Berkhamsted: Candidates C(i) and C(ii)

Great Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, held four contemporaneous Gurney households in the emigration window, and the baptisms to a father named John span forty years — 1597 to 1637. That is not one man. It is a father and a son, and only the father has ever been assessed. C(i), the elder, is eliminated on his own age and stands at 1%. C(ii), the younger, is born about 1598–1602 and would have been about fifty-one in 1653 — the best documented age fit in the whole candidate field — and stands at 6%. His household buried two children within three weeks in the winter of 1638/9 and then stopped appearing in the register; the parish’s other Gurney burials of those months belong to other households, and his best name-match child, the Richard baptised 1626, leaves the record alive.

The parish, read as a parish

Read by parent rather than by child, the Great Berkhamsted baptisms to a father John Gurney run:[1]

1597  Hugh          1615  Sara            1631  Michaell
1599  Anne          1624  Jhon            1634  Sarah / Sara
1602  Amye          1626  Richard         1636  Francys
1606  Bridgett      1629  Elizabeth       1637  Francis
1610  Henrye

Forty years of fathering. The natural break is the nine-year gap between Sara 1615 and Jhon 1624.

  • C(i), the elder John — Hugh 1597, Anne 1599, Amye 1602, Bridgett 1606, Henrye 1610, Sara 1615. Fathering from 1597 puts his birth about 1570–75, so he is comfortably eliminated on age against a colonial John who deposed “aged 50 years or thereabouts” in 1653.
  • C(ii), the younger John — Jhon 1624, Richard 1626, Elizabeth 1629, Michaell 1631, Sarah 1634, Francis 1636/7. Fathering from 1624 puts his birth about 1598–1602, so he was about fifty-one in 1653.

The split gains its first real evidence from the burial register: a Jhon Gourney was buried at Berkhamsted in 1620 — after C(i)'s last recorded child and before C(ii)'s first. That is exactly the shape the father-and-son reading predicts. It is not proof, because a second Jhon Gourney was buried in 1612 while C(i) was demonstrably still fathering, so the parish held more than one John, and the 1620 burial could be a son, a cousin, or the John baptised 1588 to a father Thomas. The discriminating evidence is the elder John’s will in the Archdeaconry of St Albans registered volume ASA/AR/8 (1610–1636), an offline pull at Hertfordshire Archives.[2] Evidence

And the parish is not one Gurney family. Read whole, the baptism corpus carries four contemporaneous households distinguished by the father’s forename:[3]

Father Children
John / Jhon Hugh 1597, Anne 1599, Amye 1602, Bridgett 1606, Henrye 1610, Sara 1615 · Jhon 1624, Richard 1626, Elizabeth 1629, Michaell 1631, Sarah 1634, Francys/Francis 1636/7
Thomas John 1588, Eliz 1591, Willm 1594, Thomas 1604, Nicolas 1607, Richarde 1635, Thomas 1638, Thomas 1640 (mother Elizabeth)
Edward / Edwarde James 1603, Elisabeth 1606, Susanna 1611
William / Willyam Anna/Anne 1594, Willyam 1632

That governs how the burials may be read: they cannot be assigned wholesale to the John line, and the Thomas household was actively baptising in 1638 and 1640. Evidence

The parish attribution itself is settled. FindMyPast indexes this family at Great Berkhampstead and FamilySearch indexes the same children at St Peter, Hertfordshire; St Peter’s is Berkhamsted’s parish church, and the two providers mean the same place.[4]

What C(ii) has

Three of the colonial forenames in one household — John 1624, Richard 1626, Sarah 1634 — against a colonial set of Sarah, Mary, Richard, John and Peter. No other English household reaches three.

The right age, from the household’s own evidence. Born c.1598–1602 on his first child; about fifty-one at the deposition.

A documented family catastrophe immediately before the crossing window. Two of his children died within three weeks of each other in the winter of 1638/9: Elizabeth, baptised 2 August 1629, buried 21 February 1638/9, and Francis, baptised 1 March 1636/7, buried 9 March 1638/9. Two providers and two record classes give the same two deaths, and the dates match to the day.[5]

His Richard is unaccounted for after baptism rather than dead in England. The Richard Gurney buried in the parish on 28 June 1638 was for months the sharpest single objection to C(ii): if he were the Richard baptised there on 15 December 1626, the candidate’s best name-match child died in England at eleven while the colonial Richard Gurney of Weymouth was alive and a freeman into the 1680s, and C(ii) collapsed outright. He is not that Richard. The register reads “Richard the sonne of Thomas Gurney was buried the xxviij of June” — the three-year-old baptised in 1635 to the neighbouring Thomas household, which was actively baptising in 1638 and 1640. The index could never have settled it, carrying name, date and place with no age and no parent; the image does. No Berkhamsted burial is now available for C(ii)'s Richard of 1626, the parish’s only other Richard Gurney baptism in the whole run being the 1635 one just accounted for. The best name-match child in the entire candidate field leaves the English record alive.[6][3]

The naming convention fits forwards. C(ii)'s eldest recorded son is Jhon 1624, and his own father C(i) was a John — the custom is being followed in this household. That also means the shape’s predicted paternal grandfather named Richard is contradicted here rather than merely missed.

What C(ii) lacks

Mary is absent at parish level, not merely at household level. Across every surname stem and every father, the Berkhamsted baptism corpus contains no Mary Gurney at any date between 1544 and 1888 — the only Mary is a 1730 burial.[3] Mary Gurney married Daniel Shed at Braintree in 1647, so she was born by 1631 at the latest. This is the single strongest objection to C(ii) and it should not be smoothed over.

The departure-shaped gap that opened C(ii) is a query artefact, and it cannot be used for him. Great Berkhamsted’s burial register survives for 1600–1660, is transcribed, and holds sixteen Gurney-variant burials 1579–1643, five of them between November 1637 and March 1638/9 — so the earlier “no Gurney burial at Great Berkhampstead at any date,” on which the candidate was first opened, was false. Read household by household, those five distribute like this:[2][6]

Burial Household
Joane Gurney, 7 November 1637 a widow — so not a child of C(ii)'s
Richard Gurney, 28 June 1638 son of Thomas — the neighbouring household
William Gurney, 1 October 1638 unread; falls on the following register page
Elizabeth Gurney, 21 February 1638/9 C(ii)'s, confirmed to the day against a second provider
Francis Gurney, 9 March 1638/9 C(ii)'s, confirmed the same way

C(ii) lost two children in three weeks, not four or five members in eighteen months. That is a family catastrophe rather than a household collapse, and it is the shape’s push event rather than a substitute for one. Evidence

No marriage can be tested, because none exists in the county. No John Gurn*/Gourn* marriage is recorded anywhere in Hertfordshire between 1600 and 1654; the set’s John Gurney marriages begin at Tring in 1655, with John Gurnett events at 1567 and 1646 bounding the negative on both sides. Great Berkhamsted’s own Gurney marriages in 1582–1722 are all brides.[7] So C(ii)'s wife cannot be named from Hertfordshire records and cannot be tested against a Mary. A groom marrying out of county would surface in the south-Midlands archdeaconry licence series, which has never been searched.

Michaell 1631 has no colonial counterpart, and neither does Elizabeth. Elizabeth demonstrably died; Michaell is unaccounted for. The dates also run systematically early — Berkhamsted John 1624 against a colonial John Jr. of about 1633, Berkhamsted Richard 1626 against a colonial Richard of about 1630 — though the colonial dates are compiled estimates rather than records, which softens the objection without dissolving it. And the family used the name Francis, which the colonial family never did; the Berkhamsted Francis died in 1639, so the colonial argument is not contradicted, but a household that named a son Francis in 1637 is a different object from one that never used the name.

The head has no burial, and the register window is defective

C(ii)'s head has no burial. No John Gurney-variant burial occurs at Berkhamsted after 1620, and none anywhere in Hertfordshire between 1620 and 1690 except Jonathan Gurney at Bovingdon in 1682–3.[8] That cannot be read as departure. FindMyPast’s own description of the Hertfordshire set states that many Hertfordshire registers are “sadly defective during the Civil War and Commonwealth period (1643–1660)” — and the Berkhamsted Gurney burials stop in 1643 and do not resume until 1711, which is the signature of that defect rather than of an empty parish. A head of household who died between 1643 and 1660 would be invisible.[9]

Coverage statement, so it is not re-run as a search: FindMyPast Hertfordshire Burials covers Berkhamsted across 1583–1660 and again from 1711. Any Berkhamsted burial negative for 1644–1660 falls inside a known defect and is not evidence.

Why the parish looked empty for two months

The earlier zero — “no Gurney burial at Great Berkhampstead at any date” — was produced by two compounding query defects, each of which fails closed, and both are worth carrying because they generalise.

  1. lastname=gurn* does not reach Gourney. The Berkhamsted family is indexed in the burial set predominantly under Gourney, and a wildcard on the gurn stem cannot match it. The five seventeenth-century Gourney burials — Isabell 1601, Henry 1607, Jhon 1612, Jhon 1620, Elizabeth 1639 — were invisible to the query that reported zero.
  2. The place token differs between sets of the same county. The baptism set and the cross-collection view label the parish Great Berkhampstead; the burial set labels it Berkhamstead. The keyword is a literal token match, so both spellings tried earlier missed a parish that is fully present: keywords=berkhamsted and keywords=berkhampstead each return zero, while keywords=berkhamstead returns 78 Smith rows.[10]

The repository already held the answer in two places. data/sources.json had carried, since a walk of 9 May 2026, the note that the Hertfordshire Burials set holds two seventeenth-century Berkhamsted entries, Jhon Gourney 1612 and 1620; and the identity assessment stated the same thing in its own prose. A sweep contradicted both and reported the contradiction as a discovery. That is the mechanism the documented but never assembled row describes, observed inside this project’s own work.[11] Evidence

Standing

C(i) is eliminated on his own age, and that ground is immune to the same-name masking problem that weakens register-continuity eliminations. He holds at 1%.

C(ii) is a documented man of the right age who buried two children three weeks apart and then went out of the register. He holds at 6% — for him, the two-child catastrophe squarely inside the departure window, the absence of any burial for the head inside a register window known to be defective, and a Richard of 1626 who now leaves the record alive rather than dead in England; against him, a parish-level absence of any Mary Gurney at any date, and no John Gurney marriage anywhere in the county in the window, so his wife cannot be named or tested. Evidence

What would settle it

  1. The adjoining burial register pages — William Gurney of 1 October 1638 on the leaf after the one read, then Thomas 1639 (two entries), Margaret 1643 and Thomas 1643. Each normally gives “son of X” or “wife of X,” and between them they would assign the rest of the parish’s Gurney burials to households and show whether C(ii) himself, his wife or any further child is among them.
  2. A Mary Gurney baptism at Berkhamsted c.1620–1624, or proof the register has a gap there.
  3. The marriage of the younger John, c.1622–23, in a neighbouring parish or through the south-Midlands licence series, which would name his wife.
  4. The Archdeaconry of St Albans probate series (ASA/AR/8, 1610–1636) for either John; a will for the elder naming his children would establish the split outright. The archdeaconry sits in the diocese of London, not Lincoln, which governs where every licence, transcript and probate for these men lives.[12]

Crosslinks

  1. FindMyPast parent-name search across collections, authenticated session, 28 July 2026: sid=102&fatherfirstname=john&fatherfirstname_variants=true&fatherlastname=gurney&fatherlastname_variants=true&collection=parish+baptisms&sourcecountry=great+britain&keywords=berkhampstead — 22 parish-baptism rows, 20 read. Great Berkhampstead children of a father John, with the index surname spelling in brackets: Hugh 1597 (Gurney), Anne 1599 (Gornay), Amye 1602 (Gourney), Bridgett 1606 (Gourney), Henrye 1610 (Gourney), Sara 1615 (Gourney), Jhon 1624 (Gourney), Richard 1626 (Gourneye; also indexed Gurnie at “Berkhampstead”), Elizabeth 1629 (Gourney; also Gurnie), Michaell 1631 (Gourneye), Sarah 1634 (Gourneye; also Gurny as Sara), Francys 1636 (Gourneye) and Francis 1637 (Gurney). Two of the 22 rows were not read. Source IDs: findmypast-uk-parish-baptisms; findmypast-hertfordshire-baptisms. ↩︎

  2. Hertfordshire Burials, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, served via FindMyPast; authenticated session, 28 July 2026. Compiled from datasetname=hertfordshire+burials&sid=103&keywords=berkhamstead runs on the stems gurn* (15 rows), gourn*, gorn* (1 row, Thomas Gorne 1620), garn* (2 rows, neither Gurney), gern* (1 row, Jhone Gernnye 1579), girn* (0 rows) and hurn* (1 row, John Hurnall 1820 — the wrong-initial class, tested and clean here). The sixteen Gurney-variant burials at Berkhamsted are: Jhone Gernnye 1579; Isabell Gourney 1601; Henry Gourney 1607; Jhon Gourney 1612; Jhon Gourney 1620; Thomas Gorne 1620; Joane Gurney 7 November 1637; Richard Gurney 28 June 1638; William Gurney 1 October 1638; Elizabeth Gurney 21 February 1638/9 (with a probable second index row as Elizabeth Gurnie 1639); Francis Gurney 9 March 1638/9; Thomas Gurney 1639 (two rows); Margaret Gurney 1643; Thomas Gurney 1643. Berkhamsted is distinct from Little Berkhamstead, a separate parish twenty miles east which the same keyword also matches and which carries no Gurney entry in this window. Note that a Gurney widow buried in 1637 implies a Gurney husband dead before then, and the parish records no male Gurney burial at all between 1620 and 1638; the observation is recorded, not built on. Source ID: findmypast-hertfordshire-burials. ↩︎ ↩︎

  3. Hertfordshire Baptisms, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, served via FindMyPast; authenticated session, 28 July 2026. Queries lastname=gurn*&keywords=berkhamstead (19 rows) and lastname=gourn*&keywords=berkhamstead (18 rows), read with the Father’s first name(s) and Mother’s first name(s) columns; the four-household reconstruction is taken from those columns. No Mary appears in either result set at any date, 1544–1888; the only Mary Gurney in the parish is a 1730 burial. No Richard Gurney baptism at Berkhamsted other than 1626 (father John) and 1635 (father Thomas) appears in the whole run. Source ID: findmypast-hertfordshire-baptisms. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  4. St Peter’s is the parish church of Berkhamsted, so FindMyPast’s “Great Berkhampstead” and FamilySearch’s “St Peter, Hertfordshire” name the same church. The two labels look like competing parish attributions and are not; anything built on the apparent discrepancy — including any argument about which archdeaconry held the parish — rests on nothing. The March 2026 children matrix names the parish “St Peter’s, Berkhamsted” outright. ↩︎

  5. FindMyPast transcripts GBPRS/D/72723160 (Elizabeth Gurney, burial 21 February 1638, Berkhamstead), GBPRS/D/72723162 (Francis Gurney, 9 March 1638), GBPRS/D/72723126 (Richard Gurney, 28 June 1638), GBPRS/D/72723092 (Joane Gurney, 7 November 1637) and GBPRS/D/72723150 (William Gurney, 1 October 1638), read 28 July 2026. Against FamilySearch, England, Births and Christenings, 1538–1975: “Elyzabeth Gurnie, Christening 2 August 1629, St Peter, Hertfordshire, Death 21 February 1639, Parents John Gurnie”; “Francis Gurney, Christening 1 March 1637, St Peter, Hertfordshire, Death 9 March 1639, Parents John Gurney.” The burial register gives 21 February 1638 and 9 March 1638 — identical events in Old Style reckoning. Source IDs: findmypast-hertfordshire-burials; fs-england-births-christenings. ↩︎

  6. Parish register, Great Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, burials, page 165 of 175 in the Findmypast Hertfordshire Burials image series, record GBPRS/HERT/007567815/00277 against transcript GBPRS/D/72723126. The unmodified master, 3,716 × 3,780 pixels, SHA-256 21beb9013d738bef7980f8b1a1da3af0e109213ccbcbfadf53bc7db80cfd46e5, was retrieved 1 August 2026 and is held local-only at sources/media/findmypast-hertfordshire-burials/_local/gbprs_hert_007567815_00277_page-165.jpg, the register carrying the rights notice “© Hertfordshire Archives & Local Studies. Not to be reproduced without permission.” Read from the image rather than the index: under the heading 1638, “Richard the sonne of Thomas Gurney was buried the xxviij of June”; on the left leaf, “Joane gurney a wido was buried the vij of November” (crop box 600,1480,1920,1600 on the master). The opening spans September 1637 to mid-July 1638, the right leaf headed 1638 Regis Caroli 14, so the William Gurney burial of 1 October 1638 falls on the following page and was not read. One further 1637/8 entry on the right leaf reads Sara the wife of Thomas under a surname whose initial capital and terminal letters are both wrong for the parish’s Gurney hand; it is set aside and is not carried as a Gurney burial. Diplomatic transcription, page grid and crop manifest at sources/corpus_supplement/findmypast-hertfordshire-berkhamsted-burial-page-165-1638.md. Source ID: findmypast-hertfordshire-burials. ↩︎ ↩︎

  7. Hertfordshire Banns & Marriages, served via FindMyPast; authenticated session, 28 July 2026. lastname=gurn*&keywords=berkhamstead → 19 rows; lastname=gourn*&keywords=berkhamstead → 3 rows (Anne Gourney × Isaac 1602; Alice Gourneye × John 1616; Elisabeth Gourneye × John 1617), the mirror query spouselastname=gourn* naming the husbands John Androe 1616, John Hunte 1617 and Isaac Thorne 1602 — so all the parish’s Gurney marriages in 1582–1722 are brides. County-wide, firstname=john&lastname=gurn* → 57 rows, of which the earliest Gurney-surname events are John Gurnett × Alis at Cheshunt 1567 and John Gurnett × Elizt at St Albans Abbey 1646, then John Gurney × Elizabeth at Tring 1655: no John Gurney marriage falls between 1600 and 1654. Source ID: findmypast-hertfordshire-banns-marriages. ↩︎

  8. Hertfordshire Burials, 28 July 2026. firstname=jhon*&lastname=gourn* county-wide with no place filter → 2 rows, Berkhamstead 1612 and 1620. firstname=jo*&lastname=gurney&yearofdeath=1650&yearofdeath_offset=40 → 3 rows: Joane Gurney 1637 Berkhamstead, Jonathan Gurney 1682 and 1683 Bovingdon. Note that jo* does not match the seventeenth-century spelling Jhon, which is why both stems must be run. Source ID: findmypast-hertfordshire-burials. ↩︎

  9. FindMyPast, Hertfordshire Burials record-set description, read 28 July 2026: of Hertfordshire’s 132 ancient parishes only 16 have registers surviving from 1538, and “many registers are sadly defective during the Civil War and Commonwealth period (1643-1660).” Source ID: findmypast-hertfordshire-burials. ↩︎

  10. Hertfordshire Burials, 28 July 2026, on an otherwise identical Smith query whose unfiltered form returns 10,912 rows including a Smith burial at “Berkhamstead” in 1583: keywords=berkhamsted → 0 rows; keywords=berkhampstead → 0 rows; keywords=berkhamstead → 78 rows, including burials at 1583, 1592, 1630, 1633, 1643 and 1660, so the series is present and transcribed across exactly the window C(ii) needs. Source ID: findmypast-hertfordshire-burials. ↩︎

  11. data/sources.json, entry findmypast-hertfordshire-burials, notes field as it stood before 28 July 2026, recording a walk of 9 May 2026: “only two seventeenth-century Berkhamsted entries, Jhon Gourney 1612 and 1620.” Cross-reference to the project’s own registry, not a source; the underlying record is the Hertfordshire Burials set cited above. The same statement appears in Identity — assessment; note that the wider claim there — that these are the only seventeenth-century Berkhamsted Gurney burials — is itself too narrow, because it was made from a John-forename query, and the parish holds eleven more under other forenames. ↩︎

  12. The candidate belt spans three archdeaconries in two dioceses — Buckingham and Bedford in Lincoln, St Albans in London, the last confirmed by a 1641 London Archives probate describing the Archdeaconry of St Albans as being in the diocese of London. ASA/AR/8 covers 1610–1636 with a contemporary calendar of testators, catalogued to item level at Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies. Worked at 61-refactor-where-the-records-actually-live.md. Note that the earlier claim that Hertfordshire probate is unreachable was a finding-aid artefact: the zero was in FindMyPast’s published-probate-index dataset, which holds no Hertfordshire volume at all. Source ID: england-wales-published-probate-indexes. ↩︎