Person:Henry Rice (6)

What relation to emigrating Sudbury Edmund Rice (1638)?

Two theories currently exist for his relationship to the emigrating founder of Sudbury, MA, Edmund Rice:

1. He was an older brother of Edmund. (Mary Lovering Holman theorizes this as one possibility (see S2 below).
2. He was the father of Edmund, but by a marriage previous to that of Elizabeth Frost. (MLH as well as Source:An interim tracing of the ancestry of Valerie Daly King (1956, p 27) also think this is more probable. (Warning: many LDS IGI records claim erroneously this parentage for Edmund.)

What is clear is that Edmund's mother could not have been Elizabeth Frost, as proven by MLH (S2 below):

• Record of Henry Rice's marriage to Elizabeth Frost in November 1605 at Stanstead.
• Record of the baptism of Edmund's first child on 23 August 1619 at Stanstead.

The probability that Henry was father of Edmund is circumstantially based on the following:

• their presence together in Stanstead, with no other Rice's before or after them in this location;
• the naming of Edmund's first son as Henry.

The location of Henry or Edmund Rice's origins have not been located.

1. ↑ Gerald Rice. Rice, Gerald G.. (Rice, Humphrey, Shattuck, Gervais, Beaudette, Angell and allied lines).

   http://wc.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=11221a&id=I08834

2. ↑ Holman, Mary Lovering, "English Notes on Edmund Rice", in The American Genealogist (TAG). (Donald Lines Jacobus, et.al.)
   10:133-134.

   (Cites parish register Stanstead, Suffolk, England.)