FamilySearch had Mary's chr. as the 23
Some sources say that Edmund had no daughter named Mary or that she died in England. Mary's Christening record has been found in the Stanstead, Suffolk, England records as being 18 Aug 1618 and her father as "Edm.".
Susan Hathaway recently discovered the marriage record of a Mary Rice and Thomas Axtell in The Herts Genelalogist and Antiquary, edited by William Briggs, Vol. 1, p. 216. They were married 10 Oct 1638 in St. Albans, Hertfordshire, England. It was submitted to the Edmund Rice Family Association and accepted. You can find it posted on their Facebook page.
This Thomas and Mary came to Massachusetts after Edmund. It is clear that Thomas bought land from Edmund. After Thomas died, Mary married John Maynard. But there is another Mary Rice in the works from Hertfordshire b. 1815 to Henry Rice and Elizabeth Frost who could have married Thomas Axtell. These two Mary's are likely double cousins.
I had tried to find the marriage in the parish record films online at FamilySearch.org but the pages were missing for the years needed to pin it down. Apparently The Herts Genealogist and Antiquary had somehow received or made a transcription of those pages before they were lost and Susan Hathway found them therein. I double checked and found the record on Google Books and on FamilySearch.
The following article from the Edmund Rice (1638) Association Newsletter; Vol. 90, No. 1 Winter 2016 explains the findings and problems better than I can:
The Enigmatic 1638 Marriage of Mary Rice¹ and Thomas Axtell in Hertfordshire John F. Chandler, Michael A. Rice, Robert V. Rice, and George W. King Ever since the English church records were found specifying the baptisms of Edmund Rice's children in Stanstead and Berkhamstead, we have been faced with two genealogical puzzles. One is the mismatch between his son Edward and the baptism showing the son's name as Edmund (which we resolve by assuming either a clerical error or a misunderstanding in the parish records), and the other is the fact that one of the children cannot be accounted for either by a burial (as in the case of Daniel, born and died in1632) or by arrival with Edmund in Massachusetts. The missing child is the first-born, Mary, baptized in1619. If you turn to the ERA database (available on CD and also on line), you can see the status of the Mary puzzle as of last year: she was presumed to have died before Edmund emigrated, even though no burial record was known, because no other record of her was known either. We had received a report that claimed she married Thomas Axtell (another early Sudbury settler), and the supporting evidence was a marriage license supposedly issued in their names by the Archdeaconry of Saint Albans, a town about 15km (9 miles) from Berkhamstead. If true, this would be a major breakthrough, since Thomas did indeed arrive in Sudbury with a wife named Mary and two children who had been baptized in Berkhamstead, and Mary survived him and went on to have other children by her second husband, John Maynard. However,some inquiries at this point led to a report that the Saint Albans Archdeaconry records no longer exist or cannot be found, and so we regretfully left the matter as an unconfirmed rumor. However, we can now report a new development: although the original records are still unavailable, it turns out that they were translated from Latin and published over a century ago! (We might in fact wonder if the records were lost or misfiled as a direct result of that project to make them more accessible, but that's all in the past.) These records were published serially, along with many other types of records, in a Page 9 periodical called the Herts Genealogist and Antiquary, which is available on-line in both Google Books and the Internet Archive. The work of translating and publishing appears to have been done very carefully, and so we can with some confidence quote the relevant passage (from p. 216 of vol. 1):[1638] Oct. 10 Tho. Axtell of Bushy, bachr and Mary Rice, maiden.These records were rather formulaic, and so the basic information is nearly the same in every case: the date of the license and the name, condition, and home town of each party. However, in this particular record,the home town of Mary Rice is not stated, and so we are left to assume she lived at Saint Albans, since why else would the clerk omit that information? To put this all in context for those who don't live in Hertfordshire, note that Berkhamstead is situated on the western edge of the county, while Saint Albans is near the center, and Bushey is on the southern edge, about 19 km (11 miles) from Berkhamstead and 13km (8 miles) from Saint Albans. The time context is also interesting: this license was issued after (but not long after) Edmund Rice must have left Hertfordshire to catch the fair-weather sailing season of 1638.So is this finally the answer to our genealogical puzzle? Did Edmund's daughter Mary come to New England just a few years after Edmund? Maybe. There is a complication to the story. We know that"our" Mary had a cousin also named Mary Rice, just a few years older, born in 1615. This other Mary was the daughter of Elizabeth Frost (Thomasine's sister) and Henry Rice (very likely Edmund's brother),making her most likely a double cousin. Indeed, Henry's family shows many parallels with Edmund's beyond the fact that they married sisters. Four of the five names bestowed on Henry's children were also given to Edmund's; one child's burial is on record in each family; both families moved to Berkhamstead about 1626 and later to the New World (in Henry's case, it was his widow and her second husband, Philemon Whale, who moved); and, in particular, both Marys are unaccounted for by any known post baptism parish records. The parallels extend even to New England, since both families settled in Sudbury,and, when Thomas Axtell died in 1646, his estate was jointly appraised by Edmund Rice, Edmund’s son Edward, and Philemon Whale. In other words, both Marys, if still alive in 1638, would likely have been living in Hertfordshire, and both were represented in the financial affairs in the closing of Thomas Axtell's estate in Sudbury. The fact that Edmund Rice had sold land to Thomas when the latter emigrated to Massachusetts could be attributed just as easily to an uncle-niece relationship as to a father-daughter one, and the fact that Philemon Whale didn't sell land to Thomas is easily understood because the Whales came over about the same time as the Axtells, around 1643, perhaps even on the same ship (but the precise times of their immigration are not known).Some additional circumstantial evidence may be relevant, though ambiguous: the children of the Axtells known from the Berkhamstead records were named Mary and Henry, the latter being also the name of the eldest sibling of each of the Mary Rices and of the father of the elder one. Further, the Massachusetts records show the birth of another Axtell child in Sudbury, named either Mary (unlikely) or Lydia,depending on which record is consulted (Lydia being also the name of Edmund’s second daughter). Another intriguing but tenuous clue may lie in the probate records of Edmund Rice himself. On page 3 of Ward's 1858 genealogy of the Rice family, the details of Edmund's probate records of 1663 are discussed(original document held in the Massachusetts Commonwealth Archives, File Index #18696, Middlesex County). A supplementary document with crossed out but readable text shows proposed monetary amounts for division of his estate among "eight eldest children" (i.e. living children by Thomasine) and two youngest (i.e. children by the widow Mercy) for a total of ten. It is known through the baptism records that Edmund and Thomasine had ten children with their son Daniel known to be deceased through a Berkhamsted burial record. Edmund’s two daughters by his second wife Mercy are accounted for in the Page 10 total, suggesting that Edmund's daughter Mary may not have been alive at the time, with the time and place of her death unknown. However, even this evidence of an 11-way distribution of assets among Mercy Brigham Rice and the ten living children is muddied by the existence of a second crossed out distribution proposal showing 12 equal shares, with Mercy receiving 3 shares, thus leaving only 9 shares for the children. Since the eldest child would be entitled to a double share, that would signify only 8 children, clearly at odds with the known set of progeny, unless the 3 shares allocated to Mercy were intended to cover her two (very young) daughters as well as herself. Ordinarily, a widow was entitled to athird of the estate, but an ordinary widow’s heirs would be her deceased husband’s children, while Mercy’s were her own Brigham and Rice children. In other words, the complicated situation calls into question the usefulness of these probate records for determining the exact number of Edmund’s living heirs at the time. In short, both Marys can make a good case for being Mary Axtell, so we still have the puzzle, and frustratingly, this may be a very difficult puzzle to resolve. Typically a disputed case of identity of this kind might be resolved by examining differences in the DNA of known descendants of Mary Rice Axtell Maynard on the female descendancy line (mtDNA), but unfortunately this method would not work in this instance. Both Mary Rice, the daughter of Edmund, and Mary Rice, the daughter of Henry, would have a common female ancestor in Thomasine Belgrave Frost, the maternal grandmother of both of them, so we would expect the same mtDNA results from both Marys, and the puzzle would still stand.The one new certainty that this marriage record from St. Albans can provide is that the maiden name of Mary Axtell of Sudbury is indeed now known to be Rice. This finding would rule out the long-held speculation that Mary Axtell’s maiden name was Starr. However, given the high degree of uncertainty about the parents, the Edmund Rice (1638) Association will not be formally listing Edmund's daughter Mary Rice (1619) as being married to Thomas Axtell within the ERA genealogical database, but instead, providing an analysis of existing data records of each of the two Marys.
¹Note by Tim Farr: The above being said, I believe that Mary Rice, who married Thomas Axtell and John Maynard, was the daughter of Edmund Rice based on preponderance of evidence. The fact that Thomas Axtell bought land from Edmund and that Edmund and one of his sons prised Thomas' estate, trumps Philemon Whale being mentioned. Edmund Rice is mentioned first, then Philemon Whale, then Edward Rice. Edmund Rice is the one who heard the will of Thomas Axtell verbally. Also a John Maynard, owned a meadow that was next to Edmund Rice's meadow and a house lot next to Henry Rice.
I feel that Mary, daughter of Edmund Rice, should be connected to Thomas Axtell and John Maynard if and until further evidence may be found.
Jane Petersen:
Many past genealogies confused Mary, the widow of Thomas Axtell and wife of John Maynard, with Mary Starr, the daughter of Comfort Starr, who also married a different John Maynard. Unfortunately, the modern Internet multiplies this past error.
The book "The Pioneers of Massachusetts, A Descriptive List, Drawn from Records of the Colonies, Towns and Churches, and other Contemporaneous Documents," by Charles Henry Pope (1900; Boston), p. 308, indicates there were three different John Maynards:
"MAYNARD, MYNARD, see MINOR…
1. John, carpenter, Duxbury, witness to will of John Cole in 1637, contracted to build a prison at Plymouth 4 March, 1638/9, had land grant at Dux. in 1640; town officer, 1645. Rem to Boston, sold Dux land 20 Aug. 1647. He m. 16 May, 1640, Mary, dau of Comfort Starr, ch. Hannah and Lydia, ae about 4 days, bapt 26(9) 1648. Inv of his est filed 7 (9) 1658. List of debts, 25 (9) 1659 [Reg. IX, 347, and XXXI. 175]
2. John, Cambridge, propr 1634; frm. May 29, 1644. May be the folg.
3. John, maulster, Sudbury, propr 1639, selectman, 1646; frm May 2, 1649. He m. 16 (4) 1646, Mary, widow [or dau?] of Thomas Axtell, ch Elizabeth b 26 May, 1649, Hannah b. 30 (7) 1653. Will dated 4 Sept. 1672, prob April 1, 1673, beq to wife Mary, sons John and Zechary; daus Elizabeth, wife of Joseph Graves, Lydia, wife of Joseph Moores, and Mary, unmarried."
Robert Charles Anderson (one of the greatest genealogists of any generation) in his "Great Migration" biography of John Maynard also clarifies that the three John Maynards are all separate individuals. On pp. 487-494, entry for Comfort Starr, he shows that Mary Starr, dau. of Comfort Starr, married in Duxbury in 1640 John Maynard. (That John Maynard is a different John than who married the widow Mary Axtell.) His estate was administered in 1658. The John Maynard who married Mary Axtell died in 1672 in Sudbury and named his wife Mary and son Zechary (among others).
The book "Vital Records of Sudbury, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849," Marriages, pp. 232-34 confirm that it was the (widow) Mary Axtell who married the John Maynard who died in 1672 in Sudbury: "John Maynard and Mary Axdell, June 16, 1646." The John Maynard who died in 1658 did so in Boston where we find his children -- his widow Mary (Starr) died in 1659.
