These research notes are provided as-is and contain supplementary working research.
Finding
First wife Mary (maiden name unknown), m. England by mid-1620s, d. Braintree 20 Sep 1661
John Gurney's first wife bore the name Mary in the compiled Braintree genealogy (Sprague, p. 695); the primary Braintree town record and Torrey both leave her unnamed - the death record enters only 'the wife of John' - and the 'Mary Richards' of later derivative trees is untraced to any primary record. He married her in England by the mid-1620s, bounded by their daughter Mary Gurney's 1647 Braintree marriage to Daniel Shed (baptized Finchingfield, Essex, 1620), which places the daughter's birth by c. 1628. By every indication she was the mother of his children, though no birth record survives to establish the maternity of any of them. She died at Braintree on 20 September 1661.
Date: died Braintree 20 September 1661 (7th month 20, 1661)
Why this conclusion
- Supported by Finding 'John Cheny' of the 1661 Braintree record = John GurneyThe resolved reading confirms the 20 September 1661 'wife of John' death line is Mary Gurney's.
- Required by Finding Born c.1602-1610 (probably c.1603-08)The older end of the birth window rests on John's marriage by the later 1620s, the bound carried on the first-wife finding in the marriages unit (from daughter Mary's 1647 Braintree marriage).
- Synthesized by Analysis Shared matching-criteria profile: tailor, wife Mary, five named children, birth c.1602–1610, gone from England by 1641The first-wife-Mary finding is one strand of the shared matching-criteria profile.
Qualifications and conflicts
- Qualified by Negative result Negative: no indexed English John Gurney x Mary marriage (wildcard-level)The unrecovered English marriage bounds the first-marriage finding: the marriage is dated by inference from the 1647 Shed bound, not by a surviving English record.
Sources
- Braintree (Mass.). Records of the Town of Braintree, 1640 to 1793. Edited by Samuel A. Bates. Randolph, Mass.: D. H. Huxford, printer, 1886., p. 638 (wife-death line, 7th month 20, 1661)
- Shedd, Frank Edson, Hubert C. Shedd, and J. Gardner Bartlett. Daniel Shed Genealogy: Ancestry and Descendants of Daniel Shed of Braintree, Massachusetts, 1327-1920. Boston: Shedd Family Association, 1920., Daniel Shed (bapt. Finchingfield 1620) m. Mary Gurney, Braintree 1647
- Sprague, Waldo Chamberlain. Genealogies of the Families of Braintree, Mass., 1640–1850. Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2001., p. 695, John Gurney entry
- Torrey, Clarence Almon. New England Marriages Prior to 1700. Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2004. Page 331, Gurney entries. Accessed via Ancestry.com, U.S., New England Marriages Prior to 1700 (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2012), database collection 3824., p. 331, Gurney block
Appears in
- John Gurney fact sheet — Vitals — Marriage(s): 'Mary (maiden name unknown) — married in England, by the later 1620s. She died at Braintree on 20 September 1661.'
Topic file location: Family — wives and marriages
Technical details
- Research item:
G13-RI-000063 - Graph revision:
244 - Machine-readable JSON:
/assets/g13-graph/findings/G13-RI-000063.json
This is one research item from the John Gurney research graph; the fuller narrative treatment is in the linked topic above and the research library.