PROJECTS

Rice Family History

My understanding is that my paternal great-grandparents, Charles Jerome Rice and Laura Maris Rice, were first generation Americans descended from Irish heritage, or possibly English on Laura's side. Charles was the son of a pioneering homesteader who moved to the Nebraska plains when it was still unsettled territory. 

I have in my possession leather diaries that date from 1883 to the early 20th century in which Charles, or C.J. as he was called, kept meticulous records of his day-to-day activities starting from the time he was around 20 years of age. These are on gracious loan to me from my Aunt Lillian Rice, the daughter of C.J.'s youngest son Walter, and they provide an extraordinary window into life on the plains in the 19th Century. Left: C.J. and Laura, photographed in Davenport, Nebraska on their wedding day in 1885. Laura was a teacher, whose family had moved west from Pennsylvania to Illinois, where she attended teacher's college, then on to Missouri. She was teaching in the Davenport area when she and C.J. met. After their wedding, they moved into their first home, a remote "soddy" on the plains in Nucholls County, Nebraska.   Below Left: The C.J. and Laura Rice Family's first home in Nucholls County, Nebraska. Below Right: The Rice's Hays County soddy, established in 1887.

Above: The sod house on the left was the house C.J. Rice moved his new bride Laura Maris into in 1885. It was located in Nucholls County, Nebraska. C.J. and Laura are pictured, along with their team and various farm animals. In 1887, C.J. moved by wagon to Hayes County, Nebraska and built the more refined soddy shown on the right. C.J. and Laura are pictured on the right side of the frame, along with Roy, their first born to survive. The identity of the other family pictured, and why they were there at the Rice home, is not known.

I have mentioned elsewhere on this site that our family experienced a devastating house fire in February 2005. We lost virtually everything, including several years of work I had done toward bringing the history of the Rice family to life in a variety of forms. Among what was lost were hours of interviews I had done with my grandfather Walter Rice, C.J.'s youngest son. For me, this was the hardest loss to take. Along with the leather bound diaries, the interviews were serving as the foundation for my book Up On the Blue, referencing the family's humble beginnings along the Blue River in Nebraska.

Miraculously, the C.J. Rice diaries survived that fire, though they were at ground zero of an inferno that began in my office and took all of my digital files and most of my hard copy manuscripts. A primary focus of mine these days is rebuilding my oeuvre of unpublished works. All are dear to me, but none of those "recovery" projects is more dear than completing the work I started on our family's history. I have the utmost respect for people who get their stories on paper for future generations to read, and for the family historians (like my Aunt Lillian Fielding on my Father's side, Second Cousin Kenny Most and Aunt Lonnie Frick on my Mother's). How else can we really understand who we are? And how can we begin to relate to the travails of others unless we have an understanding of from where it is we came?

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