Page 57 - Cousins - Celebrities, Saints & Sinners

Edgar Rice Burroughs

8th Cousin -

2 times removed

Common Ancestor

Father: John Prescott
Lancashire, England
1604-1681

Mother: Mary Gawkroger Born: Died:
England 1 September 1875 19 March 1950
1612 -1688 Chicago, Illinois Encino, California

Edgar Rice Burroughs was the fourth son of Major George Tyler
Burroughs a businessman and Civil War veteran, and his wife,
Mary Evaline (Zieger) Burroughs. His middle name is from his
paternal grandmother, Mary Coleman Rice Burroughs. He was
of almost entirely English ancestry, with a family line that had
been in North America since the Colonial era.
Through his Rice grandmother, Burroughs was descended
from settler Edmund Rice, one of the English Puritans who
moved to Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early 17th Century.
He once remarked, "I can trace my ancestry back
to Deacon Edmund Rice." The Burroughs side of the family was
also of English origin and emigrated to Massachusetts around
the same time. Many of his ancestors fought in the American
Revolution. Some of his ancestors settled in Virginia during the
colonial period, and Burroughs often emphasized his
connection with that side of his family, seeing it as romantic
and warlike, and, in fact, could have counted among his close
cousins no less than seven signers of the U.S. Declaration of
Independence, including his third cousin, four times removed,
th
2nd President of the United States John Adams (6 cousin, 7
times removed).

The son of a wealthy businessman, he was educated at private schools in Chicago, at the
prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts (from which he was expelled), and at Michigan
Military Academy, where he subsequently taught briefly. He was a mediocre student and flunked his
examination for West Point. He worked a variety of jobs all over the country: a cowboy in Idaho, a gold
miner in Oregon, a railroad policeman in Utah, a department manager for Sears Roebuck in Chicago. He
published "A Princess of Mars" under the title "Under the Moons of Mars" in six parts between February
and July of 1912. The same "All-Story Magazine" put out his immediately successful "Tarzan of the Apes"
in October of that year. Two years later the hardback book appeared, and on January 27, 1918, the

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