This is an association of the descendants of Edmund Rice, who arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony about 1638 and settled in Sudbury, Massachusetts.
The Edmund Rice (1638) Association is one of the oldest family associations in the United States. We have been meeting for an annual family reunion for about 100 years.
The 2024 Family Reunion will be held Friday and Saturday, September 20-21, 2024 at The Wayside Inn and Unitarian Church in Sudbury, MA. Details and registration are available by clicking the Annual Reunion link above.
Special activities of our association include:
- Maintaining and updating a computer database of the descendants of Edmund Rice by encouraging living cousins to submit their family information and by adding evidence from vital records, other primary sources, and US and Canadian census records. Readers may view the first six generations of that database on these pages. The first nine generations of the database is available on CD in the same format as the six generation database to association members.
- Sponsoring a patrilineal database of the Rice surname based on the YDNA tests of males by the name of Rice. This effort has been invaluable in distinguishing the descendants of Edmund Rice from Robert Royce of Connecticut and documenting the Massachusetts ancestry of William Marsh Rice, founder of Rice University. We are now helping Rices who trace their ancestry to Virginia and North Carolina to share their efforts to trace their ancestry further back in time.
- Sponsoring a matrilineal database of descendants of early colonial females of Massachusetts based on mtDNA. This new effort was tested using the mtDNA and conventional genealogy of two of our association officers whose matrilineal lines converge on Martha, wife of John Bent in the early 1600s.
Membership in the Edmund Rice (1638) Association is open to all who share our interest in Edmund Rice, his origins, and his descendants. Proof of descent from Edmund Rice is not a condition of membership. Your membership encourages the volunteers who organize our reunions and manage the special activities of our association. Want to know more about us? Check out our web pages listed on the menu side bar on the left of these pages.
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