Edmund Rice

Edmund Rice's crossing: Suffolk to Sudbury, 1638

Edmund Rice was almost 44 years old when he stepped off the boat in Massachusetts Bay. His wife Thomasine Frost was 38. They had been married 20 years, had buried one infant son, and had eight surviving children, the youngest of whom was Joseph, four months old. The family had been moving for a decade already, from Thomasine's home of Stanstead in Suffolk to Great Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire. In 1638 they kept moving, this time across the Atlantic. They settled briefly at Watertown, then moved inland in 1639 to a brand-new plantation called Sudbury, where their first New World child, Benjamin, was born in 1640. Edmund became Sudbury's selectman by 1644, deacon of the Sudbury church by 1648, and in 1656 petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for a new plantation further west. The Court granted it; the new town was named Marlborough. Edmund moved there in 1660, received a 50-acre house lot, and died there 3 May 1663. The Edmund Rice Association would build a slate monument over his grave at North Cemetery in Wayland 251 years later, with an inscription that called him a deacon from Buckinghamshire even though the documentary record places his birth in Suffolk. Twelve generations of Brant Hindman's mother's-mother's-mother's line descend from Edmund and Thomasine.