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Your Rice Family E~Zine
Generation by Generation ~ Century by Century
TWICE MONTHLY VOL. 2, NO. 12 JUNE 30, 2009
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IN THIS ISSUE
We feature
some Rices
who are
making history
in our own time
___________
Sarah Palin's Rice Ancestry
Rice Ancestry of Microsoft
Guru Bill Gates
Southern Family Trees:
Some Early
Rice Marriages
in Caswell County,
North Carolina
Family of
Susan Rice,
US Ambassador
Condoleeza Rice
Family Outlined
For Root Diggers
~ Advice from
Abraham Lincoln
~A Research Tip
~ What's a Yankee
College Founder
John Andrew Rice
(Send links to your genealogy pages;
they must include
a Rice line.)
ARE THERE
SPRING BUDS
ON YOUR
FAMILY TREE?
1) If you are not a male bearing the Rice surname, find a relative who is and have a DNA test done.
2) Send in the name of your earliest known Rice ancestor, giving at least one date and location, and we will try to match it with those families being researched by other readers. Email: ricebooksreb@yahoo.com
FORM IS HERE
If your newsletter looks like it is not properly formatted,
or is garbled,
please let us know!
Anyone have
old family pictures
to share?
(We love looking
at them!)
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NEXT ISSUE
We will follow William Rice, son of a well-to-do North Carolina planter, first to Missouri, where he set his slaves free in 1859, then to Califonria, where he ended up with about 9,000 acres and 7,000 head of cattle.
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Sarah Palin's Rice Ancestry
Photo by J.delanoy
Whether impressed with Sarah Palin or not, the unsuccessful nominee for vice president in the 2008 election remains on the political horizon. So, how is she related to the Rices? Well, she has two lines.
Sarah is a descendant of Dea. Edmund-1 Rice from England, who settled at Sudbury, MA, in 1638. Here is the line of descent.
EDMUND RICE and Thomasine Frost
HENRY RICE, who married Elizabeth Moore, the daughter of John and Elizabeth Moore
HANNAH (RICE) WARD and Richard Taylor, son of Richard and Ruth Taylor
NATHAN TAYLOR who in 1715 married Mehitable Cobb.
WILLIAM TAYLOR (1717-1808) who in 1741 married Anne Gorham (1716/7-1792).
TEMPERANCE TAYLOR ( b. 1744) who in 1770 married Ebenezer Hawes (1735-1809)
ISAIAH HAWES, born in 1777, married Desire Collins in 1808 at Yarmouth, MA. Both sets of his parents are Howland/Tilley descendants, giving him and all his descendants a double Mayflower line to four Mayflower passengers.
ABIGAIL HAWES, born in 1813 at Augusta, ME, and married Cornelius Norton Gower, born in 1810 at Industry, Maine. He shares her Howland/Tilley ancestry.
ARTHUR COLLINS GOWER was born at Abbot, ME, in 1852 and died in 1943. He married in Cook Co., IL in 1880, Mary Schmolz, born 1860 in Germany.
JAMES"CARL" GOWER (1882-1954), born in Wisconsin and died at Pocatello, ID; married ca. 1904/5, Cora Strong, born 1886, Chippewa Co., WI.
HELEN LOUISE GOWER (1907-1985) was born in Wisconsin and married in 1929 at Pocatello, ID, Washington native Clement J. "Clem" Sheeran (1907-1992); both died in Richland Co., WA.
SARAH "SALLY" SHEERAN, born 1940 in Richland, WA; she married Charles "Chuck" Richard Heath, born 1938, Los Angeles, CA. They are parents of Alaska Gov. Sarah Louise (Heath) Palin (b. 1964).
Sarah Palin's overall ancestry is here.
Sarah Palin has a heavy dose of colonial New England ancestry and also descends from several colonial governors. She has at least 10 Mayflower lines. In addition to passengers John Tilley, his wife Joan and his daughter Elizabeth, plus Elizabeth's husband, John Howland, she also descends from passengers William Brewster, Richard Warren, Stephen Hopkins and Henry Sampson.
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RICE LINEAGES OF BILL GATES
Microsoft Guru Belongs to
2 Unrelated Branches
of the Rice Family
BILL AND MELINDA (FRENCH) GATES
Bill Gates Descends from Robert Royce/Rice of Connecticut and has a Rice great-grandfather whose line dead-ends in Pennsylvania.
His Rice lines of descent are summarized below. Take a look. If some of you are "kissin' kin" to Bill, email and let us know who the common ancestors are!
THE LINE THAT NEEDS DISCOVERED
Bill's grandfather, William Henry Gates (1891-1969) married Lillian Elizabeth Rice (1891-1966). She reportedly was the daughter of a William Rice (ca. 1862-aft. 1920) who was born in Pennsylvania and settled in the state of Washington. He married in 1888 Isabella _(?)_, who was born in England ca. 1871 and died in Washington after 1920.
It seems strange that so little is known about people who died so recently. This is, however, common with Rices in Pennsylvania, where ancestors may have come from Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Vermont and Maryland. This Pennsylvania Rice mix also includes numerous families from Germany whose name was anglicized to Rice. In addition, there are plenty of William Rices to sort through in Pennsylvania.
THE CONNECTICUT ROYCE LINE
Bill's Connecticut line is from Robert Royce and his wife, Mary Sims, whose daughter Sarah married John Caulkins/Calkins. (Her brother Jonathan married Deborah Caulkins). These Royces lived in New London, CT, in the mid 1600s and some of Sarah Royce's brothers moved to Wallingford, CT.
The Royce home built in Wallingford by Sarah's brother, Nehemiah Royce, in 1672 (pictured here), was lived in by Royce descendants for more than 200 years. It appears on the U. S. Register of Historic Places and now is part of the Wallingford Historic Preservation Trust. Descendants of this Nehemiah Royce include actor Clint Eastwood and Millard Fillmore, 13th president of the United States. (Some early members of this family and their descendants are covered in Rice Book 2: The Immigrants.)
The Bill Gates descent from these early Royces is through the Ca(u)lkins, Curtis, Elmer, Gibbs, Tupper and Oakley families to Belle Oakley, born in 1872 at Dunkirk, NY. She married James Willard Maxwell in 1889. He was from Iowa and founded the National City Bank in Seattle. Both were living when the 1930 census was taken. Their son, James Willard Maxwell, married Adele Thompson and they were the parents of Mary Maxwell (1929-1994), the mother of Bill Gates.
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SOUTHERN FAMILY TREES
Some Early Rice Marriages
in Caswell County, North Carolina
INTRODUCTION
The following Rice marriages are from the earliest marriage books of Caswell Co. Many of these Rices are mentioned in Marymaud Killen Carter's 1974, 344-page book titled Fifteen Southern Families. The chapter on the Rices cites many official sources and the data is well documented. Now, 35 years later, it appears that these 11 marriages which cover a time span of less than 20 years may indeed relate to members of three separate branches of the Rice family.
The Southern Rice email list recently had an in-depth discussion of the Jeptha(h) Rice line.
1780: John Reece and Mary Ann Stringer
1781: Nathaniel Rice and Susan(n)ah Butler
1782: Zere Rice and Mary Mitchell
1784: Jepthah Rice and Nancey Jouit (Jouet)
William Rice and Susan(n)ah Brooks
1793: William Rice and Esther Chounan
1795: William H. Rice and Sarah Gooch
Edmond Rice and Henrietta Rice
1796: Ibzan Rice and Dolly G. (or Gee) Carloss
1797: Williamson Rice and Zuriah Simms
1798: Henry Rice and Margret Shelton
Listed as heads-of-household in Caswell County when the 1790 census was taken are Hezekiah, Ibsan, John (three of them), Nathan (2), Thomas and William Rice.
Rootsweb has a site which lists various Rices who lived in Caswell
County, but not all of this information is documented, nor should it be taken as conclusive. Please use this information only as clues to follow up on and try to document. (Like me, some of you will spot errors.)
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Susan Rice: U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations
Susan Elizabeth Rice, President Obama's pick for United Nations ambassador, has been on the fast track for about 20 years. She is brilliant, well-prepared for this assignment and, like Condoleeza Rice, who is not related, has had a fast-paced career, spent time at Stanford University, and has never let her black origins keep her from aspiring to a rewarding career.
Rice had extensive high-level service in the Bill Clinton administration and briefed Obama on foreign policy during his campaign.
Ambassador Rice has expertise in the problems posed by weak and failed states, global poverty and transnational security threats. She also has a reputation for being blunt-spoken, but also for being a politically connected fast-riser. A prot�g� of Madeleine K. Albright when she was Secretary of State, Ms. Rice catapulted over more veteran officials in 1997 to become one of the youngest assistant secretaries of state ever. She also brings early experience with Al Qaeda; Ms. Rice was the top diplomat for African issues during the 1998 terrorist bombings of embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Since then she's been a member of several influential foreign policy groups. Susan Elizabeth Rice was born in 1964 in Washington, DC. She was a star basketball player and valedictorian at the National Cathedral School, an elite private high school in Washington. She earned an undergraduate degree from Stanford University, where she met her future husband, Canadian Ian O. Cameron. She received both a master's degree and a doctorate in international relations from New College at Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.
Cameron followed her to London, receiving a master's degree in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science. They were wed in 1992. After serving as a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Co.) producer, he has now followed his wife to Washington as ABC's Executive Producer of "This Week with George Stephanopoulos".
Susan's father, Dr. Emmett John Rice, traces his roots to the American South. He was born in 1919 in Florence, South Carolina, a son of Rev. Ulysses Rice. His family moved to New York City when he was 16. Rice studied at the City College of New York, receiving a B.B.A. in 1941 and an M.B.A. in 1942. He then joined the U. S. Army Air Force in World War II, serving with the famous Tuskegee Airmen.
After the war, Emmett Rice earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley and was a Fulbright scholar in India. He taught economics at Cornell as the university's only black assistant professor. Dr. Rice then served in the distinguished post of governor of the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1986.
Dr. Emmett Rice's parents were the Rev. Ulysses Simpson Rice (ca. 1875-1927) of Sumter Co., SC, and Sue Pearl Suber (ca. 1882-1968) of Sumter, SC, who were married ca. 1905. Susan's mother, Lois (Dickson) Rice Fitt, was born in 1933 at Portland, Maine, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica. She became a vice president of the College Board, then a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution. Her second husband is Alfred B. Fitt.
David Augustus Dickson (1887-1979), father of Lois, was born at Watson Hill, Manchester, Jamaica and died at Portland, ME. He was a son of John Dickson of Watson Hill, Jamaica. In 1920, he applied for a passport so he could visit his mother in Jamaica, taking with him his son, Leon, 6. The application noted that his father was deceased. There are notes on his possible ancestry, but nothing definitive.
An Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice, speaking of prioritizing the needs of Africa, said:
"The battle we face is not of Republican versus Democrat, but of the indifferent versus the committed." |
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Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice
Condoleeza Rice, George Bush's Secretary of State, was--like current UN Ambassador Susan E. Rice--a bright fast-charger who refused to let her race dampen her aspirations. She was self-programmed to succeed.
Condoleeza was born in 1954 in Birmingham, AL, a city that would become a testing ground for civil rights activists. Her father, the Rev.  John Wesley Rice Jr. (1923-2000), was born in Baton Rouge, LA, and died at Palo Alto, CA. His father, the Rev. John Wesley Rice Sr., a Baton Rouge minister, became the founder of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Birmingham. The mother of John Jr. was the former Theresa Hardnett, daughter of Sylvester Hardnett of Baton Rouge and his wife, Cora.
The Rice line continues through yet another John Wesley Rice, a farmer in Greene Co., Alabama who married Julia Head. Julia is believed to be the daughter of plantation owner Burr Woodward Head of Greene Co., Alabama, by a black servant. Burr was a son of James and Margaret (Coates) Head.
Condoleeza's mother, the former Angelena Ray (1924-1985), was the daughter of Albert Robinson Ray III, a coal digger in Jefferson Co., AL, who married Mattie Lou Parham, daughter of Walter and Emma Parham.
An only child, Condoleeza grew up in a house that prized education (her mother was a teacher). Rice started learning French, music, figure skating and ballet at age three. At age 15, she began classes with the goal of becoming a concert pianist. Her plans changed when she realized that she did not play well enough to support herself through music alone.
Condoleeza was just entering her teens when her parents moved to Denver, CO, where her father became assistant dean and a professor at the University of Denver.
She attended a course on international politics taught there by Josef Korbel, the father of future Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. This experience sparked her interest in the Soviet Union and international relations and made her call Korbel "one of the most central figures in my life."
Her degrees were from the University of Denver and Notre Dame. She first worked in the State Department in 1977, during the Carter administration, as an intern in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
Rice became a Stanford University professor. At a 1985 meeting of arms control experts at Stanford, Rice's performance drew the attention of Brent Scowcroft, who had served as National Security Advisor under Gerald Ford. With the election of George H. W. Bush, Scowcroft returned to the White House as National Security Adviser in 1989, and he asked Rice to become his Soviet expert on the United States National Security Council. According to R. Nicholas Burns, President Bush was "captivated" by Rice, and relied heavily on her advice in his dealings with Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.
After serving in the elder Bush's administration she return to Stanford where, as Stanford's Provost, Rice was responsible for managing the university's multi-billion dollar budget. The school at that time was running a deficit of $20 million. When Rice took office, she promised that the budget deficit would be balanced within "two years." Coit Blacker, Stanford's deputy director of the Institute for International Studies, said there "was a sort of conventional wisdom that said it couldn't be done... that [the deficit] was structural, that we just had to live with it." Two years later, Rice announced that the deficit had been eliminated and the university was holding a record surplus of over $14.5 million.
After serving in the younger Bush president's second term as Secretary of State, Dr. Rice again returned to Stanford.
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FOR FELLOW ROOT DIGGERS & BRANCH CLIMBERS
Remember me in the family tree- My name, my days, my strife: then I'll ride upon the wings of time and live an endless life. ~ Goetsch
ADVICE FROM ABRAHAM LINCOLN
A woman once wrote to Abraham Lincoln asking for a bit of advice and his signature to keep them for keepsakes. She did not include a return envelope. President Lincoln reportedly replied:
"When asking strangers for a favor, it is customary to send postage. That's your advice and here is my signature - A. Lincoln"
If you have an ancestor who disappeared in the late 1840s or the early 1850s, try looking not only in the federal 1850 and 1860 California census records, but also in the 1852 state census of California, which asks for place of residence; many answered by the name of the state from which they came.
More than 50,000 people went to the California gold fields. By 1855, about half of them had moved on or returned to their former homes.
FRESHEN UP THOSE MUSTY BOOKS AND PAPERS
If you want to freshen up papers and books that smell musty, put them in a brown paper bag along with some clean cat litter. Close the bag tightly and leave it sit for a week. When you take the papers and books out of the bag they will no longer have an odor.
WHAT'S A YANKEE?
To a foreigner, a Yankee is an American.
To a Southerner in the United States, a Yankee is a Northerner.
To the Northerner, a Yankee lives in New England.
To a New Englander, a Yankee is someone from Vermont.
To someone in Vermont, a Yankee is someone who still uses an outhouse! |
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John Rice's Black Mountain College
PICTURED ABOVE IS THE MAIN BUILDING OF THE FORMER BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE NEAR ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA. THE CAMPUS NOW BELONGS TO CAMP ROCKMONT, A SUMMER CAMP FOR BOYS.
North Carolina College Founder John Andrew Rice
John A. Rice (1888-1968) founded an unusual college that didn't quite fit the mold. He was the founder and first rector of Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina. During his time there, he introduced many unique methods of education which had not been implemented in any other experimental institution.
This was a new kind of college in the United States. The study of art was seen to be central to a liberal arts education, and John Dewey's principles of education played a major role. The school attracted many students and faculty that went on to become influential. Although notable even during its short life, the school closed after only twenty-four years in 1957.
Rice attracted important artists as contributing lecturers and mentors. They included John Cage, Robert Creeley, William de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg and Franz Kline. During World War II, Rice opened the college's door as a haven for refugee European artsts such as Josef and Anni Albers, who arrived from the Bauhaus in Germany. Later, Black Mountain College became the platform for the work of Buckminster Fuller, creator of the geodesic dome. The first dome was built at the college.
In retrospect, the college has been seen as an important incubator for the American avant garde. Black Mountain proved to be an important precursor to and prototype for many of the alternative colleges of today, including Evergreen and Goddard Colleges.
 Because of his strong ideas and unusual educational philosophy, Rice became involved in many debates during the socially conservative 30's, 40's and 50's. He was known as a critic of many of the widely implemented methods of higher education and as such was very outspoken in his observations. Rice was born in Lynchburg, South Carolina. He was the son of a Methodist minister and his mother, Annabelle Smith, was from a prominent South Carolina family. Rice attended The Webb School, a highly regarded boarding school located in Bell Buckle, Tennessee. There he encountered the teacher he would revere all his life, John Webb. Rice then attended Tulane University--from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree--and won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University.
After Rice graduated from Oxford, he married Nell Aydelotte and began teaching at The Webb School, but left after a year to pursue doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. Years later, he divorced his first wife and married Dikka Moen.
John never completed his doctoral studies; instead, he secured a faculty position at the University of Nebraska. Rice proved himself to be brilliant in the classroom and in counseling students. His teaching methods were aimed at accelerating the student's emotional and intellectual maturity, rather than encouraging a reliance on a store of subject knowledge.
From the University of Nebraska, Rice took his unique teaching strategies to the New Jersey College for Women. He was forced to resign after two years amid a faculty controversy which was not resolved. He then landed a faculty position at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. At Rollins, he found himself again in a controversial position, as faculty and students found him to be either brilliant and charismatic, or divisive and argumentative. Rice also spoke out against the institutions of fraternities and sororities. He objected to various policies of Rollins President Hamilton Holt and was asked to resign.
Rice then began planning for the learning community that became Black Mountain College. The college opened in 1933 with 21 students and eventually grew to nearly 100 students. Rice pioneered new, innovative ideas. He brought with him the values of experimental learning and the contribution of social and cultural endeavors outside the classroom. Rice enjoyed bringing visitors into classrooms and encouraged students to take part in community work projects.
Rice gained attention because of his new ideas and his open mind to unusual teaching methods. Black Mountain College began to be recognized nationally.
He had a second career as a writer, contributing many short stories to such publications as Colliers and The New Yorker. He also published a book of short stories entitled "Local Color" and wrote his memoir entitled "I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century".
During his period as a writer, John Rice wrote extensively about both his mother and father's families. We will be sharing those stories in future issues.
These sources tell more about Rice and his college:
Adamic, Louis,1936, "Education on a Mountain." Harper's 172:516-530.
Duberman, Martin, 1972, Black Mountain College: An Exploration in Community,New York: Dutton.
Harris, Mary Emma, 1987, The Arts at Black Mountain College, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lane, Mervin, ed., 1990, Black Mountain College, Sprouted Seeds: An Anthology of Personal Accounts. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Reynolds, Katherine Chaddock, 1998, Visions and Vanities: John Andrew Rice of Black Mountain College. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
John A. Rice (1888-1968) - Black Mountain College, Life as a Writer", State University.com, 2008
John Andrew Rice: Black Mountain College's Provocative Patriarch, Blackmountaincollege.org.
The following pictures of Black Mountain College are Courtesy of the North Carolina State Archives.
 1944 BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE FACULTY MEMBERS
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Draw the Family Circle Wide, Then Draw It Wider Still
Share both the fruits of your genealogical labors
and the puzzling problems you encounter
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FIRST THREE VOLUMES AVAILABLE:
The Rice Book Project
BOOK 1: Celebrating Our Diversity
Biographies of dozens of Rice family members from different backgrounds, different decades and different branches of the family; also a directory of Rice Revolutionary War soldiers; 248 pages
BOOK 2: The Immigrants
Lists of immigrants for three centuries; early generations of the Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut branches of the family; chapters on English, Irish, Scottish and German Rice families; 258 pages.
BOOK 3: Connecticut & Tennessee Rice Lineages
This covers several branches of the Rice family and chronicles in detail descendants of Henry Rice, the pioneer gristmiller in Tennessee; 512 pages.
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BOOK 4: Pennsylvania and Maryland Rice Lineages
This is the book we are now working on.
Order books from the Rice Book Project Website.
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(The RICE FAMILY EZINE is sponsored
by the Rice Family Book Project)
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