Two years ago I was working on my Brewer line, trying to see how far back others had taken it, when I came upon an Elizabeth Rice, who died in 1693, and who would have been my 8th great-grandmother. Her father was Henry Rice, and his father was Edmund Rice. But I recognized that name: Edmund Rice was in my wife Patti’s family tree. We had visited his Massachusetts grave in 2015 on a one day genealogy expedition outside of Boston exploring cemeteries where our ancestors are buried: Patti's King's and Rice's, and my Brewer's and Allen's, who had all lived and died in this commonwealth.
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| Patti by Edmund Rice's grave marker in 2015 |
Patti's paternal ancestry is well-covered in the book "The Kings of the Kingdom" written by a second cousin of hers, Larry R. King. This takes Patti's ancestry back to England in the 1600s, where Patti's 8th great grandfather Edmund Rice was born and married Thomasine Frost in 1618 before emigrating to the British colony of Massachusetts in 1638. Since a number of Edmund's descendants found their way to the LDS church this line is well documented.
While checking out Edmund's grave we ran into another descendant who was also visiting the cemetery that day, and that coincidence caused me to google Edmund and I found out that Edmund descendants are abundant. From the Wikipedia article on Edmund Rice:
By 2017, the ERA electronic database of known Edmund Rice descendants into the 14th and 15th generations had exceeded 260,000 individuals.[108] Using data from the ERA electronic database, a total of 2.7 million of Edmund's descendants has been estimated to be in the 12th generation, with a total estimated 4.4 million descendants cumulatively in the first twelve generations.
This extrapolation of the size of Edmund's present-day family comes from an article by John F. Chandler in the Edmund Rice Association newsletter here. I don't know any other of my ancients who warrant their own newsletter!
If Edmund Rice is generation 1, Patti is in generation 11, and I am in generation 13, so we are two of the estimated millions of Edmund's descendants mentioned in the article above. Patti is a 9th cousin of my paternal grandfather: we are two generation levels different, so she's my 9th cousin twice removed. Over the last few hundred years her ancestors were spread out a bit more than mine in time - there are more older children and younger marriages in my ancestry by chance, so that accounts for the two generation difference even though Patti and I were both born about the same time.
I used to use Patti as an example of how random unrelated people still share small bits of DNA in GedMatch: setting the match criteria to 3cM (the lowest setting), we show 11 shared segments, the largest 4.7, 5.6, and 6.0. But now that I know we are related, all bets are off; these may be Edmund Rice and Thomasine Frost bits!
Starting with Edmund Rice in the Family Search Family Tree I can follow the two paths down to Patti and me. The Brewer line is less well-documented, so I have a bit more work to do there reviewing sources. But it has become a bit of a family story now that I ended up marrying a cousin!
Sources
Chandler, John F., "Extrapolating the size of Edmund's present-day family," in Edmund Rice (1638) Association Newsletter, Vol. 87, No. 4, Fall 2013, accessed online 23 Jun 2023 at http://www.edmund-rice.org/newsletters/vol_87_4_2013_fall.pdf.
King, Larry. 2008. The Kings of the Kingdom: The Life of Thomas Rice King and His Family. Second. Orem, Utah: Larry R. King.
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