The Rice line

Ezra Perin was given his mother’s surname as a middle name, and he gave it to his son Charles. Ezra Rice Perin, Charles Rice Perin: two generations kept the Rice name in the family on purpose. This chapter follows it back.

Rachel

Rachel Rice was born on 1 April 1782, according to Glover’s genealogy, and married John Perin on 10 December 1803 as his second wife. She bore him twelve children, Ezra among them. Published genealogy

The marriage itself is in the town records of Charlemont, Massachusetts, in the hills of Franklin County. The printed volume of those records, published in 1917, lists it twice, once under each name: “PERRIN, John and Rachel Rice, ——, 1803.” No banns were recorded, and the day was not entered. Seen in records

Charlemont is the reason this chapter exists. It was a Rice town before it was a town at all.

Charlemont, 1755

On 23 April 1743 Captain Moses Rice, born in 1694, bought 2,200 acres of a frontier grant that would become Charlemont, and became its first settler. His son Samuel’s family lived there too. Published genealogy

In June 1755, in the early years of the French and Indian War, Moses was ploughing a field when he was shot from ambush. A second man, Phineas Arms, was killed. Moses was carried into the woods, scalped and left for dead, and did not survive. His eight-year-old grandson, Asa, who had been riding the plough horse, was taken captive and carried north to Canada.

A report signed by Samuel Rice, gathered in 1758 when the colony asked families to account for their captives, says Asa was taken at Charlemont on 11 June 1755, aged eight, and carried to St. Francis, the Abenaki mission village in what is now Quebec. Titus King, who was taken captive in the same attack, wrote an account of his own captivity, and its 1938 editor identified the boy King saw with Captain Rice as Asa Rice. Published genealogy

Asa came back from Canada; we do not yet know when or how. He grew up, married, and moved west into New York, where by the 1830s he was living at Luzerne, in Warren County.

Asa’s will

Asa Rice of Luzerne made his will on 24 January 1833 and is indexed at Warren County Will Book A, page 167. In 1937 Gertrude Barber abstracted the Warren County wills from the Surrogate’s originals, and her summary of this one reads:

Mentions: wife Jemima; sons Asa Jr., Jesse; daughters Lucy w. Robert R. Bennett, Rina w. Stephen Kinyon; grandsons George Kinyon, Stephen Kinyon; daughter Rachel Parin.

Gertrude A. Barber, Abstracts of Wills of Warren County, New York, Book A, 1937

Asa had a daughter named Rachel, and by 1833 her surname was Parin. Seen in records

In October 2026 the Warren County Surrogate’s Court found the original file, scanned it, and sent it: the will itself, three pages signed and sealed by Asa, the executors’ notice of probate, and two affidavits of 1841. The will confirms Barber on the point that matters. Its ninth clause reads:

Ninthly I give and bequeath unto my daughter Rachal Parin five Dollars.

Will of Asa Rice of Luzerne, 24 January 1833, Warren County Surrogate’s Court

It opens with something Barber left out. Asa describes himself as “aged Eighty Four years and upwards according to the best of my knowledge.” That fits the boy taken from Charlemont: eight years old in June 1755 makes him eighty-five or eighty-six in January 1833. Seen in records

The other papers fix the dates. On 25 May 1833 his three executors gave notice that they would ask the Surrogate, at Caldwell on 17 June, to prove the will, so Asa died that spring, between January and late May. The notice was carried by hand to the heirs who lived nearby: his son Asa at Luzerne, his daughter Mrs. Kenyon at Hadley, and his eldest daughter Lucy Bennet at White Creek. Rachel was not among them. Neither was her brother Jesse, who lived in Jefferson County. In 1841, when the money left over was divided, affidavits listed the children of Lucy and of Jesse, who shared it; Rachel’s five dollars was hers alone, and her family is not mentioned. Seen in records

Is she our Rachel?

Very probably. Here is the case, and what is still missing.

• The place. Our Rachel Rice married John Perin in a record kept at Charlemont, the town Asa’s grandfather founded and where Asa himself was taken as a boy.
• The name. “Parin” is how Perin sounds, and old clerks spelled by ear. Glover found the family written five different ways in Rehoboth alone.
• The dates. Asa was about thirty-five when our Rachel was born in 1782. Glover gives Rachel no death date; Grandpa’s database has her living until 1866, at Blue Grass, Iowa, so she was certainly alive in 1833.
• The earlier researcher. A Stanley Perin, very likely Grandpa’s uncle, found this will years ago and concluded, as the Rice family association reported in 2001, that Rachel Parin was almost certainly John Perin’s wife.

What is missing is a document that names her husband or where she lived, and the court file, now read in full, does not have one. Lucy and Mrs. Kenyon appear with their husbands; Rachel appears with neither husband nor town. That she alone of the three daughters was not handed the notice fits a woman living far off in Indiana, but it does not prove it. The next place to look is a deed in which Asa’s heirs released their shares of his land: see the quest.

Until then, this history marks Asa as Probable, not proved.

Asa’s father

The Rice family association’s genealogy makes Asa a son of Samuel Rice, the son of Captain Moses, and Samuel was the one who signed the 1758 report about the boy’s capture. Charlemont’s printed vital records, which drew on a Rice family Bible then kept in the town, confirm Samuel as Moses’s son and give his wife as Dorothy Martin, born 20 April 1721. Samuel died in 1793 and Dorothy in 1790. Published genealogy

A 2012 newspaper article said Asa’s father was a Paul Rice and seemed to attribute that to Titus King’s narrative. On checking, the narrative does not say so; the claim was the article writer’s. That leaves Samuel unchallenged, though still resting on the genealogy rather than on a record naming him as Asa’s father.

Back to Suffolk

From Moses the line runs into one of the most thoroughly studied families in New England. If Asa holds, this is it:

1. Edmund Rice about 1594 – 3 May 1663 married Thomasine Frost at Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, 15 October 1618 A founder of Sudbury, Massachusetts in 1638, appointed to lay out its roads and lots; deputy to the General Court; one of the petitioners who founded Marlborough in 1656. Grandpa’s eight-times-great-grandfather, the same distance back as the first John Perrin. Published genealogy
2. Edward Rice baptised 20 October 1622 – 15 August 1712 married Agnes Bent in 1646 Baptised at Stanstead, Suffolk, and in Massachusetts with his father by his late teens. A deacon at Marlborough. The Charlemont family Bible names his wife “Amie,” a puzzle still to solve. Published genealogy
3. John Rice married Tabitha Stone Published genealogy
4. Moses Rice 1694 – 1755 First settler of Charlemont; killed in the raid of 1755. Published genealogy
5. Samuel Rice 1720 – 1793 married Dorothy Martin (1721–1790) Published genealogy
6. Asa Rice about 1747 – 1833 his wife in 1833 was Jemima The captive boy. Probable, not proved
7. Rachel Rice 1782 – 1866 married John Perin, 1803 Seen in records
8. Ezra Rice Perin 1818 – 1902 and from him, Charles, Arthur, and Grandpa.

There is a quiet irony here. For more than a century the family looked for its English roots on the Perrin side, among the Ashby pedigrees and the coats of arms, and the link has never been proved. If Asa Rice holds, the family’s best-documented English roots were on the Rice side all along: a marriage at Bury St Edmunds in 1618 and a baptism at Stanstead in 1622, both identified by the Rice family’s own researchers.

The Edmund Rice (1638) Association has traced his descendants for decades, and their number is now estimated in the millions. Grandpa would be one of a very large crowd. But he would be one of them by a line that can be written down, which is more than most of the crowd can say.