Sunday, August 28 after have a good breakfast at our B&B we set off exploring more of the lovely town of Dingle. I heard back from Pat the local historian and even though he’s very busy he would like me to call him to see if we can arrange a meeting time. Stephen advised that I should wait until after 12:30 to call. We walked through town and found a church with gardens that were open for us to walk through,

We continued our walk through town and along the harbor.

I called Pat Neligan and he asked if we could come at 2:00 this afternoon. You bet we can! We arrived at the Duinin House B&B at the appointed time and spent about 45 minutes with the delightful Pat. He was full of information about the Rice’s, primarily but not all about Count James Rice. James came to prominence in the late 1700’s much after my direct ancestors arrived in Colonial Virginia in 1650. James made many important friends throughout Europe and in his later years divided his time between Spa, Belgium and Bath, England. Coincidentally we spent almost a week in Spa in March of this year with our “Rice” cousins who live in Germany and we will be spending several days in Bath next month. My direct ancestors were wine merchants. Pat wrote a book about James Louis Rice, which I purchased from him. It’s called The Knave of Trumps, The Life & Times of Count James Louis Rice of Dingle 1730-1801. Apparently he wanted a different title but this is the title his editor suggested. Unfortunately the book was published in 2016 and after Trump’s election sales decreased. He also shared the family tree he made while doing research for his book. He related what information he had and told me about the cemetery on Main St. behind the church that contained a couple of graves. We warned that the graveyard was quite grown over and I would probably have difficulty locating the stones. Today marks the one month anniversary of the death of my uncle, Jack Rice Cohn, and I know how much he would have loved learning this information because he spent a lot of time researching the Rice family.

We met up with Marie & Jim and headed to the cemetery. Overgrown is an understatement and our search revealed nothing but at least we tried.

We had dinner outside at a hotel across the street from the church, then went to The Dingle Pub next door to the church to sit outside and listen to the music.