Analysis

Anderson's "Boston" settlement attribution reads as a conflation with the 1636 Newgate apprentice

Anderson's Great Migration Directory gives John Gurney's New England settlements as Boston and Braintree, but no Boston record names him. The attribution is most plausibly the same conflation that produced the American family tradition of an 1615 birth at Southwark: the 1636 runaway apprentice John Gurney - a distinct, younger man - was bound to John Newgate the feltmaker and lived in Newgate's Boston household, a servant's position that would generate neither a church admission nor a property record. A short unrecorded stay at Boston by the elder John before he appears at Weymouth in June 1641 remains possible; Boston lay under a day away and traded with Weymouth constantly. But transient lodging is invisible in principle, so the scenario can be neither tested nor used.

Confidence: Moderate-high

Topic file location: Identity — assessment