Gurney Genealogy Library Updated 15 July 2026 by Allen Gurney

Weymouth, Massachusetts, USA

Place research page generated from the structured place spine and the companion place markdown.

South-shore town where four generations of the line lived: the emigrant John Gurney Sr. (G13) first recorded 1641, his son Richard (G12), and Richard's son and grandson Benjamin (G11, G10), both born here. Individual Gurney land grants are tracked as their own sub-places (Richard's Great Pond homestead; John Sr.'s East Field, Mill Field, and east-side-of-Great-Pond grants).

Linked ancestors

Record jurisdiction and county scope

Which record series to search for a Weymouth resident depends on the county the town sat in, and that changed repeatedly:

  • Suffolk County (created 1643) held Boston, Braintree, Weymouth, Hingham, Dorchester, Roxbury, and Dedham for the whole of John Gurney’s colonial life. Every county-level court, deed, and probate record for his towns from 1643 to his death in 1662/3 is in the Suffolk series (Suffolk Deeds, Suffolk Probate, Suffolk County Court files) — the colonial spine already worked in the Gurney research. There is no separate 1640s–60s “Weymouth deeds” registry to hunt for.
  • “Old” Norfolk County (1643–1679) was Salisbury, Haverhill, Hampton, and the towns north of the Merrimack — nothing to do with Weymouth or Braintree. Colonial “Norfolk County” hits for this family are a false-friend trap.
  • Modern Norfolk County (created 1793) is the one that contains Weymouth, Braintree, Quincy, and Randolph today, so it is relevant only for post-1793 series — nineteenth-century cemetery and vital-record transcriptions, and the “Norfolk County” labels on sites such as Find a Grave.
  • Plymouth County / Plymouth Colony. Hingham moved into Plymouth County only in 1803; in John’s era Hingham was Suffolk. Plymouth Colony (a separate seventeenth-century jurisdiction) is where to look for Scituate matters and for the colony-boundary line just south of Weymouth and Hingham.
  • Before 1643 — John’s first record is 1641 — there were no counties at all: the roll-up is the colony itself, the Massachusetts Bay General Court and Court of Assistants records and the Boston-centred notarial, church, and land books. That is why colony-level and Boston-level sweeps are the correct widening for the pre-1641 arrival window.

Related place records

The Gurney land grants at Weymouth are tracked as individual place records: