About Deacon Edmund Rice
Edmund Rice is well documented. The Edmund Rice Association is one of the oldest family associations in the United States. Please consult their publications before merging or making profile changes. "Until someone can cite such a record, the Association must state emphatically that Edmund Rice's parents and ancestry are not known and that Edmund Rice's descendants cannot claim royal ancestry"'. 'There is no doubt that his wife's sister married into the Rice family at Stanstead, but there is no proof that he was the same person as Edmund Rice, of Stanstead.

Edmund Rice was born in England about 1594, probably in Stanstead, Suffolk, England. His parentage is unknown. He married Thomasine Frost at St Mary's in Bury, Suffolk, on 15 October 1618. Thomasine , daughter of Edward Frost and Thomasine Belgrave, was born in Stanstead on 11 August 1600. They had eight children in England before emigrating to the American colonies, probably in 1638, where two more children were born. Thomasine died in Sudbury Massachusetts on 13 June 1654 and Edmund married Mercy Hurd widow of Thomas Brigham of Cambridge, Massachusetts in Sudbury on 1 March 1655/6. Mercy had two daughters and three sons by her first marriage. Edmund was buried in Sudbury on 3 May 1663, "age about 69".

Marriages and Children

Thomasine Frost married 15 October 1618 St. Mary's Church, Bury St. Edmunds, England
Henry Rice born c.1617 England, baptised 13 February 1620/1, married Elizabeth Moore
Edward Rice born c.1619 England, baptised 20 October 1622, married Agnes Bent
Mary Rice baptised 23 August 1619 England, died unmarried
Thomas Rice baptised 16 January 1625/6 England, married Mary King
Lydia Rice born c.1627 England, baptised 9 March 1637/8, married Hugh Drury
Matthew Rice born c.1629 England
Daniel Rice baptised 1 November 1632 - died November 1632 England
Samuel Rice born 1634 England, baptised 12 November 1634, married Elizabeth King, Mary Browne, Sarah Hosmer
Joseph Rice born before 13 March 1637/8 England, baptised 13 March 1637/8, married Mercy King, Mary Beers, Sarah Wheeler
Benjamin Rice born 31 May 1640 Sudbury, Middlesex, Massachusetts, married Mary Brown
Mercy Hurd married: 1 March 1655 Sudbury, Middlesex, Massachusetts
Lydia Rice, born c.1657 Sudbury, Middlesex, Massachusetts, married James Hawkins, Jr.
Ruth Rice born 29 September 1659 Sudbury, Middlesex, Massachusetts, married Samuel Wells
Note

Please note that a son and daughter often mistakenly attributed to Deacon Edmund Rice have been proven not to be his children. Ann Rice , the wife of Nathaniel Gerry/Gary, belonged to a different Rice family; it appears that Edmund Rice never existed.

Biographical Sketch

Edmund Rice was born in England about 1594, probably in Stanstead, Suffolk. He is believed to have been the younger brother of Henry Rice, who married Elizabeth Frost, sister of Edmund's wife, Thomasine Frost. The marriage of Edmund Rice and Thomasine Frost was recorded on the register of St Mary's in Bury, Suffolk, 15 October 1618. Thomasine was born in Stanstead 11 August 1600, the daughter of Edward Frost, and Thomasine Belgrave. Her father was a wealthy "clothier", a cloth manufacturer.

Knowing the names of Edmund Rice's children, family historians have traced his family back to England using church baptismal records for his children and, eventually, to his marriage to Thomasine Frost. However, no record of his baptism nor any other record that names his parents has been found.

The Rice family lived first in Stanstead, Suffolk, England; later in Great Barkhamstead, Hertfordshire. They emigrated to New England about 1638, and were settled in Sudbury by 1639. The first record of his presence in the New World is in Township Book of the Town of Sudbury in the year 1639. Regrettably, no ship's passenger list has survived and we have no record of Edmund Rice and his family before 1639 so we can not be certain exactly when or where he and his family arrived in the New World.

Edmund Rice and the other early settlers at Sudbury were well prepared for the tasks of forming and governing a new community. As yeomen they had assumed both personal and community responsibilities back in England. As Protestant churchmen they had been encouraged to read and write so that they could study and understand their Bible. Although not of the noble class, they had shared many community and church responsibilities in their former communities in England.

He was one of the substantial men of the plantation, owning lands in and out of the town, some by grant of the court. He shared in all the divisions of uplands and commons and the total number of acres which he received as an original inhabitant was 247 acres. His first dwelling in Sudbury was on the old North Street. This he sold in 1642 to John Moore, and bought of Widow Mary Axtell six acres of land with her dwelling house, in the south part of the town. Some years afterwards he bought of Philemon Whale his house and nine acres adjacent to the Axtell place. All this together formed the old Rice homestead in Sudbury, which remained in the family for many years. In 1654 Edmund deeded it to his son Edward, who conveyed it to sons John and Edmund. In 1647 he took a ten-year lease on the Glover farm, mostly in what is now Framingham, and in 1657 he bought 200 acres more. In 1659, he bought the Dunster farm.

Edmund Rice was one of the prominent leaders of his community at both Sudbury and Marlborough. He was made a selectman of Sudbury in 1639, took the freeman's oath 13 May 1640, and subsequently, was made Deacon of the church in 1640, and represented Sudbury at the General Court at Boston in 1654. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Puritan Village, The formation of a New England Town, Sumner Chilton Powell sums up the high regard that his fellow citizens had for Edmund: "Not only did Rice become the largest individual landholder in Sudbury, but he represented his new town in the Massachusetts legislature for five years and devoted at least eleven of his last fifteen years to serving as selectman and judge of small causes," and "Two generations of Sudbury men selected Edmund Rice repeatedly as one of their leaders, with the full realization that they were ignoring men of far more English government experience who had come with him."

Thomasine died in Sudbury, Massachusetts, on 13 June 1654 and Edmund remarried nine months later, on 1 March 1655/6, to Mercy Hurd, widow of Thomas Brigham of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mercy had two daughters and three sons by her first marriage.

Although much respected by his fellow townsmen, Edmund seems to have had an independent side to his nature. In 1656 Edmund Rice and others petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for a new town which became the City of Marlborough. Edmund moved his immediate family and was elected a Selectman at Marlborough in 1657. Later generations of Rices were founding members of many new communities, first in New England and Nova Scotia, and later across the United States and Canada.

Deacon Edmund Rice died on 3 May 1663 at Sudbury, Massachusetts, "age about 69". He was buried at Old Burying Ground, Wayland, Massachusetts. One possible site of the grave is marked by a monument designed by Arthur Wallace Rice of Boston, Massachusetts, dedicated by the Edmund Rice Association on 29 August 1914. A boulder with a bronze tablet was also erected by the Association and it marks Edmund's homestead on the Old Connecticut Path in Wayland.

Genealogical Research on Parentage and Ancestry

Twice in the twentieth century nationally-recognized research genealogists have attempted to determine the parents and ancestors of Edmund Rice. Mary Lovering Holman described the negative result of her search for records in the parishes near Stanstead and Sudbury, Suffolk County, England in “English Notes on Edmund Rice”, The American Genealogist, Volume 10 , pp. 133 - 137. In 1997 the Edmund Rice Association commissioned Dr. Joanna Martin, a nationally-recognized research genealogist who lives in Hitcham, Suffolk, England, only a few miles from Stanstead and Sudbury, to search again for records of Edmund Rice's parents. Dr. Martin reported in 1999 that she found no record that identified Edmund's parents or ancestral line.

Several authors of published works and computer datasets have claimed names for Edmund Rice's parents. Regrettably they have not given sources that would assist in definitive genealogical research. For example, the Ancestral File and International Genealogical Index, two popular computer datasets widely distributed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, offer parent candidates that include: Henry Rice and Margaret Baker, Henry Rice and Elizabeth Frost, Thomas Rice and Catherine Howard, and Thomas Rice and Elizabeth Frost.

From Mrs. Holman's paper we have an excellent record of one Henry Rice's marriage to Elizabeth Frost in November 1605 at Stanstead. Mrs. Holman also documents the baptism of Edmund's first child on 23 August 1619 at Stanstead. If this is the Henry Rice and Elizabeth Frost to which the LDS records refer, the LDS records must be erroneous. Our researchers have not been able to find records that support any Henry Rice and Elizabeth Frost, Henry Rice and Margaret Baker, Thomas Rice and Catherine Howard, or Thomas Rice and Elizabeth Frost as parents of Edmund Rice.

A scholarly investigation by Donald Lines Jacobus, considered by many as the dean of modern American genealogy, appeared in The American Genealogist, volume 11, , pp. 14-21 and was reprinted in the fall of 1968 and the winter of 1998 issues of Newsletter of the Edmund Rice Association. Jacobus traced many of the false accounts to the book by Dr. Charles Elmer Rice entitled "By the Name of Rice”, privately published by Dr. Rice at Alliance, Ohio in 1911.

Sudbury, England includes three parishes, two of which do not have complete records for the years near 1594, which is Edmund's most likely birth year. Edmund Rice deposed in a court document on 3 April 1656 that he was about 62 years old. Thus, if he were born in Sudbury his records have been lost and we may never know his origin.

In his address to the 1999 annual meeting of the Edmund Rice Association, Gary Boyd Roberts, Senior Researcher, New England Historic Genealogy Society, reviewed all of the genealogical sleuthing on Edmund's parentage. Mr. Roberts is well known for his research on royal lineage. He concluded that there was no evidence whatsoever that supports the published accounts of Edmund Rice's parents and no evidence that Edmund Rice was from a royal lineage.

Source: Who were Edmund Rice's ancestors?, Edmund Rice Association <edmund-rice.org>.

Speculations About Ancestry

In 1992 Reg Rice reported finding a conjunction of King, Parmenter, and Rose families in Polstead, Suffolk:

Joan Parmenter, born 5 December 1585, daughter of Richard
Will King, born 26 October 1595, son of John
Edmund Rose, born 22 December 1585, son of Tho.
King and Parmenter families appear in Sudbury, Massachusetts as associates of Edmund Rice, although it is not clear they are Polstead families of the same name. Thomas King was one of 13 petitioners with Edmund Rice in 1656; he was one of three who took the inventory Edmund Rice, and three of Edmund's children married into the King family.