Gurney Genealogy Library Updated 15 July 2026 by Allen Gurney

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

Colonial Braintree community

John Gurney lived at Braintree, Massachusetts, from about 1645 until his death in 1662/3 — his settled colonial home after leaving Weymouth. His Braintree years are documented by the 1645 plantation petition, an imaged 1646 petition he signed alongside the town’s founding cohort, a 1652/3 court deposition that names him “of Brayntree,” a fifteen-year tenancy of William Tyng’s farm (the future Adams family seat), his own Monatiquot-River freehold, and repeated service as a witness and appraiser for his neighbours. His principal Braintree landholding was leasehold, not freehold; the freehold he owned outright was a separate, smaller homestead he sold the year he died.

Residence and the move from Weymouth

John’s Weymouth parcels had already passed to other men by the 1643 property record, and he was established at Braintree by 1645, so the move falls c. 1642–1645; the earlier Weymouth phase is set out in Colonial arrival chronology. The firmest attestation that Braintree became his home is a Suffolk Court Files deposition of 17 March 1652/3 in Wilson v. Faxon, which describes “John Gurney of Brayntree aged 50 Yeares or thereabouts.”[1] (The stated age bears on his English birth year and is weighed in the origin/age-baptism work, not here.) Evidence

The 1645 plantation petition

In May 1645 John signed the inhabitants’ petition for the new plantation at Braintree (Mount Wollaston) — a marker of established standing in the town.[2] The signature is presently known through the secondary History of Weymouth report; the primary petition page has not yet been located, so the datum is carried at moderate confidence pending that pull.[2] Evidence

The 1646 meadows petition

A year later John’s name appears on a second Braintree petition, and this one survives as an imaged primary record. In 1646 he was among the inhabitants who petitioned the General Court at Boston against Thomas Gilbert — a tenant of a small upland patch who was invoking an “ancient order of Court” to graze “a great heard of cattle” across the petitioners’ meadow lots, some hundred acres lying round about Gilbert’s eight or ten acres of upland; the magistrates answered over Governor John Winthrop’s endorsement, sending the petitioners back to an earlier order of 1643.[3] John signs shoulder to shoulder with the town’s founding cohort — Martin Sanders (the lead signer), Peter and Richard Brackett, and Henry Adams, immigrant progenitor of the presidential family whose descendants would later hold the very Tyng farm John leased — among Samuel Bass, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Albee, John Dassett, James Penniman, and Thomas Meakins.[3] The signatures fix John in a documented 1646 act of town business, seventeen years before his death, beside three men — Peter Brackett, Richard Brackett, and John Dassett — who reappear as creditors in his own 1663 estate accounts.[3][4]

This meadows petition is a different document from the May 1645 plantation petition above, and the two should not be run together: the 1645 petition is still known only from the secondary History of Weymouth and remains unlocated in the primary record, while the 1646 meadows petition survives imaged at Massachusetts Archives volume 45.[3][2] Evidence

The leased Tyng farm — the future Adams seat

In 1647 the Boston merchant William Tyng leased John a forty-five-acre Braintree farm for ten years, and John continued to lease it from Tyng’s daughters Bethia and Mercy until 1662, so the tenancy ran continuously for about fifteen years.[5] Tyng himself was a non-resident owner — he had taken up the Mount Wollaston lands as a Boston merchant-proprietor in 1639, among the large absentee allotments that shaped early Braintree landholding — which is why the working farm was leased to a resident like John rather than owned by him.[6][7] The same farm appears in the 1653 Tyng probate inventory — “48 Akers land at Braintree and Marsh in possession of John Gurney” (forty-five acres in the National Park Service / Ezekiel Sargent reading) — and again in the 28 March 1661 Tyng estate-division indenture, which names John as the sitting tenant.[8][9] The 1653 inventory and the 1661 indenture are two snapshots of one lease, not two separate tenancies. The northern portion of “the Gurney farm” later became the Adams family seat — the Old House (Peace field) in Quincy, acquired by the Adamses in 1787, beside the birthplaces of Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams.[5]

This is leasehold, not ownership: John’s principal Braintree land was a tenancy, and the farm was distinct both from the larger roughly five-hundred-acre Tyng holding (Salter’s Farm / Mount Wollaston, leased to John Read and then Gregory Belcher) and from John’s own Monatiquot freehold below.[5][9] Evidence

The Monatiquot freehold

John did own a Braintree homestead outright. On 12 February 1661/2 “John Gurney, tailor” conveyed to Richard Thayer, for fourteen pounds, a house and orchard, a five-acre parcel on the Monatiquot River, and an adjoining half-acre; possession was given on 16 April 1662, and the deed — signed by John’s mark — was witnessed by Peter Brackett and John Rockwell.[10][9] The conveyance is the clearest single attestation of his trade (“tailor”), of a Braintree freehold he held in his own right, and of his close associates. The Suffolk registry copy of this same deed, recovered through a FamilySearch full-text search, independently carries the styling “John Gurney of Braintry Taylor” — a second manuscript-registry witness to the trade, alongside Bates’s printed transcription and the printed Suffolk Deeds Liber IV.[11] His final-years landholding therefore had two distinct parts: the leased Tyng farm and this separate Monatiquot homestead — the “Gurney farm” of later local memory and his personal freehold are not the same parcel. Evidence

Trade and livelihood

John’s trade was tailoring — he is styled “John Gurney, tailor” in his own 1661/2 Monatiquot deed, and Sprague’s compiled Braintree genealogy likewise enters him as a tailor.[10][12] Yet the working economy of his last years was a husbandman’s: his March 1663 estate inventory held not one tool of the tailoring trade, and its value lay in livestock, plough-gear, and grain — the material record read in full in Colonial material life. His occupation is best read as a trained trade overtaken in practice by mixed farming: a tailor by name, a husbandman by the measure of his goods.[12] Evidence

Standing in the community

John was repeatedly trusted with his neighbours’ affairs. In 1659 he witnessed Gregory Baxter’s Braintree will (with Moses Payne and Richard Brackett) and helped take the estate inventory on 7 July 1659.[13] Together with the 1645 petition signature and the dense creditor network mapped by his own 1663 estate accounts — debts to Peter Brackett, Joseph Adams, and other Braintree men — the record shows a tradesman of modest means who nonetheless held recognised standing in the town.[4][14] Peter Brackett recurs throughout: he witnessed the 1661/2 Thayer deed, was a creditor of the 1663 estate, and was among the Braintree men tied to the later Mendon purchase.[4][14] Evidence

  1. “Notes: Braintree, Mass., Items,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 62 (January 1908), p. 94, Suffolk Court Files item no. 188 (“John Gurney of Brayntree aged 50 Yeares or thereabouts. Dated 17-1-[16]52-3”; old-style month numbering gives 17 March 1652/3). Source ID: nehgr-62-94. ↩︎

  2. Petition of the inhabitants for the new plantation at Braintree (Mount Wollaston), May 1645, reported in History of Weymouth, Massachusetts (Weymouth Historical Society, 1923), vol. 3, John Gurney family entry. Primary petition page not yet located (research lead L-191). Source ID: history-of-weymouth. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  3. Petition of Martin Sanders and others of Braintree against Thomas Gilbert’s cattle grazing the petitioners’ meadow lots, Massachusetts Archives Collection (Felt Collection), vol. 45 (“Lands, 1622–1726”), p. 11, with the magistrates’ answer slip at p. 11a endorsed “16 3 (46)” / “1646” over “Jo: Winthrop: Gov’r,” referring the petitioners to an earlier order of 1643. FamilySearch film DGS 007702989, image 1403 (p. 11, ark 3:1:3Q9M-C9Y5-YWYK) and image 1402 (p. 11a, ark 3:1:3Q9M-C9Y5-YWYP); read at full-resolution image level 2026-07-02/03, the working transcription and signature readings about ninety per cent confident and pending paleographic verification. The signature line reads “john gournet” or “john gourney” (final letterform ambiguous) — the “GURNET / GORNET” head-form under which Pope’s Pioneers of Massachusetts indexed the emigrant; whether the signature is autograph or clerk-collected is unresolved, John having signed his own 1661/2 Thayer deed by mark. This is Pope’s “[Arch. 45]” record, distinct from the 1645 plantation petition. Source ID: massachusetts-archives-vol-45-lands-1622-1726. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  4. Suffolk County, Massachusetts, Probate Records, Case #338, John Gurney Senr probate inventory, Braintree, 16 March 1663; manuscript image; project extract and analysis at sources/corpus_supplement/john-gurney-probate-inventory-spr-case-338.md. Source ID: spr-case-338-john-gurney-probate-1663. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  5. National Park Service, Cultural Landscape Report, Adams National Historic Site (1997), pp. 12–13 (Site Chronology) and Figure 1 (“William Tyng’s 45-acre farm, Braintree, 1649”), citing the Ezekiel Sargent manuscripts (Quincy Historical Society, “Land Formerly of William Tyng”). Extract at sources/corpus_supplement/nps-adams-clr-1997-gurney-tyng-extracts.md. Source ID: nps-adams-nhp. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  6. Charles Francis Adams, History of Braintree, Massachusetts (1639–1708)… (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1891), p. 5 (William Tyng’s 1639 purchase of the Mount Wollaston lands; “large allotments, indicative of a non-resident ownership”). Source ID: adams-history-of-braintree-1891. ↩︎

  7. Charles Francis Adams, “The Genesis of the Massachusetts Town, and the Development of Town-Meeting Government,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd series, vol. 7 (1892) — the early land system, undated property records, and the non-resident-proprietor doctrine that produced the large absentee Mount Wollaston / Braintree allotments. Source ID: adams-genesis-massachusetts-town-1892. ↩︎

  8. Capt. William Tyng inventory abstract, New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 30 (1876), p. 432 (“48 Akers land at Braintree and Marsh in possession of John Gurney”; the NPS/Sargent reading of the same inventory gives 45 acres). Source ID: nehgr-30-432. ↩︎

  9. Thomas F. Temple, Register of Deeds, Suffolk Deeds. Liber IV (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1888), pp. 6, 89a–90, index p. 150 (28 March 1661 Tyng estate-division indenture; 12 February 1661/2 Gurney–Thayer conveyance). Source ID: suffolk-deeds-liber-iv-1888. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  10. Samuel A. Bates, The Ancient Iron Works at Braintree, Mass.: The First in America (South Braintree: Frank A. Bates, 1898), p. 10 (12 February 1661/2 conveyance, “John Gurney, tailor,” to Richard Thayer). Source ID: bates-ancient-iron-works-braintree-1898. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  11. Suffolk Deeds registry copy of the 12 February 1661/2 Gurney–Thayer conveyance, recovered through FamilySearch full-text search of the AI-transcribed manuscript images (“John Gurney of Braintry Taylor”); a second manuscript-registry representation of the deed printed at [10] and [9]. Source ID: familysearch-fulltext-search. ↩︎

  12. Waldo Chamberlain Sprague, Genealogies of the Families of Braintree, Mass., 1640–1850 (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2001), p. 695 (John Gurney entry — compiled Braintree genealogy recording John as a tailor resident at Braintree). Compiled derivative source corroborating the primary deed; not independent primary evidence of the trade. Source ID: sprague-braintree. ↩︎ ↩︎

  13. Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620–1633, vol. 1 (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2012), Gregory Baxter profile, p. 138 (John Gurney witnessed the will with Moses Payne and Richard Brackett; inventory taken 7 July 1659 by John Gurney, Moses Paine, and Edmund Quinsey; Suffolk Probate Records 1:323, 3:146). Extract at sources/corpus_supplement/anderson-great-migration-begins-v1-baxter-user-extract.md. Source ID: anderson-great-migration-begins-v1-baxter. ↩︎

  14. “Suffolk Wills,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 12 (1858), p. 53 (John Gurney estate debts; Widow Wilson entry). Source ID: nehgr-12-suffolk-wills-1858. ↩︎ ↩︎