Little Comfort / Abington-Bridgewater line, Massachusetts, USA

Gurney origins at Little Comfort

Little Comfort — the milling hamlet of south Abington, then within the bounds of Bridgewater and later South Abington / Whitman — was the seat of the Abington Gurneys. John Gurney came from Weymouth and settled here about 1690, dying about 1715, intestate; his estate was divided among his children, among whom were Richard, David, and Nathan. He is, on convergent evidence, the John Gurney-3 (son of Richard Gurney of Weymouth, G12) whom Rigler names as founder of the Little Comfort sawmill — the first of the three south-Abington mills, built about 1698. John’s brother Benjamin (G11) is the direct ancestor, so the Little Comfort Gurneys and the direct line spring from the same Weymouth household.^[1][2]

John’s nephew Nathan Gurney — a son of John’s brother Zachariah, not of John himself, as the compiled genealogist Jean Gurney Rigler establishes against an older reading in Hobart — married Sarah Harden of Little Comfort (a blacksmith’s daughter) about 1725 and raised here his wife’s nephew Benjamin Gurney (G9), baptized at Abington in 1730. While the direct line later moved west to Cummington, Nathan’s descendants stayed: the Whitman Gurney houses recorded in the Massachusetts Cultural Resource Information System (e.g. the Nathan-and-Martha-Pullman house, WHI.307, and the Jeremiah-and-Mary-Fullerton house, WHI.325) mark their continued presence on this ground. See research/people/nathan-gurney-abington.research.md.^[1]