early 1930s, Alexander Hamilton Rice, Jr. (1875-1956) commissioned genealogist Mary Lovering Holman (1868-1947) of the New England Historic Genealogical Society to examine existing information on Edmund Rice and produce an updated genealogy. On 10 January 1934, the ERA incorporated under the laws of Massachusetts as the Edmund Rice (1638) Association, Inc. For the 1938 tricentennial of Edmund's immigration to America, the ERA published Elsie Hawes Smith's Edmund Rice and his Family and in the 1940s and 1950s continued correspondence and gatherings of Rice descendants. Beginning in December 1960, the ERA began publishing a quarterly newsletter to disseminate genealogical and historical information about Edmund Rice, his ancestors and his descendants. By 1968, the ERA had compiled and verified 26,000 descendants of Edmund after publication of their first addendum to Ward's genealogy. During the 1970s and 1980s, the ERA published further genealogical research findings in three additional volumes, and in the mid-1990s, the Association began transferring all of their print records into an electronic format. By 2017, the ERA electronic database of known Edmund Rice descendants into the 14th and 15th generations had exceeded 260,000 individuals. Using data from the ERA electronic database, a total of 2.7 million of Edmund's descendants has been estimated to be in the 12th generation, with a total estimated 4.4 million descendants cumulatively in the first twelve generations. In 1980, Edmund Rice descendant Corinne M. Snow (1925-2008) wrote a historical fiction novella titled The Deacons based upon the primary historical records of Edmund Rice and his family and Powell's (1963) Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town. The story covers the life of the Rice family in the time period beginning about 1621 in Suffolk, England, through their immigration to Massachusetts in 1638, until the 1713 founding of Worcester by Edmund's grandchildren Jonas, Gershom, and James. It provides an interpretation of the family's experiences in Stanstead, Suffolk, as well as in Berkhamsted, and it offers a purely fictional account of their departure from Southampton Harbor aboard the Confidence to Watertown, Massachusetts. The story further provides an insight into the Rice family's life in Puritan Massachusetts during the political controversies generated as Sudbury and Marlborough were being founded and the experiences of the family during King Philip's War of 1675–78. Genetic genealogy Since 2000 with the initial leadership of Robert V. Rice, the ERA has conducted extensive haplotype DNA testing on males known to or believed