Gurney Genealogy Library Updated 15 July 2026 by Allen Gurney

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

Identity — Ackworth, Yorkshire

John Gurnoe married Mary Burton at Ackworth, Yorkshire, on 6 June 1636, and a son, John Thomas Gurnoe, was baptized at the same parish seven months later, on 19 January 1637.[1] Nothing else about this household is indexed: no burial of either spouse and no further child survive in the present Findmypast coverage. It is the only same-name comparator anywhere in the record sweeps whose wife is genuinely named Mary in roughly the right window,[2] which keeps it visible at a residual ~3% — the highest of the non-Candidate-B rows — rather than eliminating it outright.[3]

The case against Ackworth being the emigrant

Two structural problems outweigh the wife-name match. The first child is John Thomas, born seven months after the marriage, not Sarah; the colonial John Gurney’s first child is Sarah, born about 1628 on the strength of Sprague’s History of Weymouth and Torrey’s New England Marriages Prior to 1700.[4] The naming and birth order do not line up, and a 1637 son named John Thomas collides with the colonial John Jr., born about 1633. Yorkshire also sits well outside the Norfolk–Suffolk–Essex–London corridor that produced the Great Migration; Yorkshire emigration to New England in the late 1630s exists but is comparatively sparse, and no primary record bridges an Ackworth Gurnoe household to any Massachusetts arrival, town record, or to any of the colonial John’s identified English associates.

Weighing the other way, the colonial John’s marriage to his first wife Mary is itself bounded to before 1628 by his daughter Mary’s own chronology, so a bride married in 1636 fits only as a hypothetical second English marriage — a reading the record gives no support for. Older compiled Gurney family histories do sometimes give the colonial John’s wife as “Mary Barton” or “Mary Burton,” and the 1636 Ackworth marriage is the first primary record to supply that exact name combination at a plausible date; the household’s disappearance from the indexed Yorkshire record after 1637 is also the kind of gap an emigration would produce. Both points keep Ackworth above the noise floor of a bare same-surname coincidence without overturning the naming and corridor objections above. Evidence

Standing and open work

The case file (v4.3, §8 and §11) carries Ackworth as Unlikely, ~3% — capped there by the pre-1628 marriage bound on the colonial John’s own first marriage and by the John Thomas naming collision, and it is not treated as eliminated the way Candidates A, C, and D are.[3] The Ackworth household’s own disappearance from the indexed Yorkshire record after 1637 has itself been searched and comes back empty, which is why the row is held rather than cleared.[5] Three lines of work could move the estimate in either direction: a West Yorkshire Archives or Borthwick Institute image pull of the 1636–1637 Ackworth register to recover the baptism’s parents and confirm the marriage’s spelling and any further children; an Ackworth burial register search for either spouse (not yet indexed by Findmypast); and, most materially, tracing the earliest compiled-genealogy occurrence of the “Mary Barton/Burton” tradition. If that tradition predates the availability of modern indexes, it is independent evidence pointing at Ackworth and the household’s probability should rise; if it first appears only after IGI-era derivative trees became available, it is circular — later compilers matching the same index entry — and the residual estimate should stay where it is. Evidence

  1. Findmypast England Marriages 1538–1973, transcript R_855220028: John Gurnoe and Mary Burton, marriage 6 June 1636, Ackworth, Yorkshire (source ID findmypast-ackworth-gurnoe-burton-marriage-1636). Findmypast England Births & Baptisms 1538–1975, transcript R_948023155: John Thomas Gurnoe, baptism 19 January 1637, Ackworth, Yorkshire; father and mother not indexed (source ID findmypast-ackworth-gurnoe-baptism-1637-john-thomas). ↩︎

  2. Findmypast supplementary same-name sweep, May 2026, across twelve Gurney surname variants and eighteen English parish, burial, probate, and licence collections — the sweep against which the wife-name test was run over every surfaced household. Source ID: findmypast-john-gurney-2026may-supplementary-same-name-sweep. ↩︎

  3. Cross-reference, not a source. John Gurney identity case file, §8 candidate table and §11 probability assessment, Ackworth row. The ~3% residual is the case file’s own probability model; the evidence for and against the household is cited above, and the figure itself is neither derived nor re-derived here. ↩︎ ↩︎

  4. Waldo Chamberlain Sprague, Genealogies of the Families of Braintree, Mass., 1640–1850 (Boston: NEHGS, 2001), p. 695 (Source ID: sprague-braintree), and Clarence Almon Torrey, New England Marriages Prior to 1700 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2004), p. 331 (Source ID: torrey-new-england-marriages-prior-1700) — the colonial John Gurney’s daughter Sarah’s birth placed about 1628, bounding his own first marriage. Cited here cross-unit; the family-group finding is canonically authored as G13-RI-000065 in Family — the children as a family group. ↩︎

  5. No John Gurney or Gurnoe burial in Yorkshire 1637–1700 surfaces in Findmypast Life Events (Deaths & Burials) or the National Burial Index for England & Wales, Yorkshire section; no further indexed Yorkshire Gurnoe baptism after John Thomas Gurnoe (Ackworth, 19 January 1637) appears across Findmypast Yorkshire Baptisms or FamilySearch indexed records for 1637–1665. The disappearance is symmetric between unindexed parish-register continuation and undocumented emigration, which is why the row is held at Unlikely rather than eliminated. Source IDs: findmypast-uk-parish-baptisms, fs-england-births-christenings, findmypast-ackworth-gurnoe-burton-marriage-1636, findmypast-ackworth-gurnoe-baptism-1637-john-thomas. ↩︎