Excerpt from By the Name of Rice: An Historical Sketch of Deacon Edmund Rice, the Pilgrim, 1594 1663, Founder of the English Family of Rice in the United States; And of His Descendants to the Fourth Generation

Oh that mine adversary had written a book quoth the afflicted Job; and let him tackle the Rice family chronology, say I, and Nemesis has him by the scruff. There are too many Rices and few of them are wildly enthusiastic upon the ques tion of their origin. When Mary A. Livermore, that Queen of the American Platform was nearing her eightieth year, she wrote me that 'the question of where she was going to she thought upon by day and by night.' Now I had early formed the bad habit of sleeping at night, after I had said my Now I lay me, and even by day I seldom worried over the question of a tropical futurity. That great and good woman has long since departed and I do not know the result of her nocturnal introspection. If she could read this history of her Ancestors she would learn whence she came, but I hope she has ere this, met the good Deacon, and knows all about it without having incurred insomnia. It must be told, however that there was once a question as to the Deacon's whereabouts after life's fitful fever. It was in this wise. Upon the return of one of Deacon Rice's grandson's to the patrimonial fields and ancestral acres he viewed his grandfather's grave and sadly remarked to the old sexton, Well, John, the old Deacon has joined the great majority. Oh, Sir, replied the enlightened sexton, I wouldn't just like to say so Sir, the Deacon he was always considered a very fair sort of a man Sir. And so he was, and I have endeavored to give his history faithfully and impartially, not being deterred for a moment by the apathy encountered when seeking information from some of the wisest and best informed of the Deacon's posterity. At first it seemed a futile and frenetic search, likely to be a great cry for little wool, as the Devil said when he tried to shear the pig. However it soon transpired that these antipathetic and recusant relatives were only sporadic cases and kindly first aid to the genealogist.

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