Waking Me Up

Two weeks or so after I wrote the last Rice ancestry post, I woke up in the middle of the night and as I'm prone to do in my older age, my mind began to wander and suddenly remembered that I had an artifact of the Rice family that I had pondered on long ago. I wasn't quite sure what it was but I was fairly certain that it had belonged to a J. J. Rice which seemed very important considering I just realized my 4th great grandfather was Johannes Justus Rice and not Daniel Rice as previous suspected.

I laid there for awhile wondering if I should go back to sleep and possibly forget about this memory by morning or to just get up at an ungodly hour and look into it further. After rolling around for a half hour, I got up and did the latter. I quickly found the item I had remembered in the back corner of our china hutch. It is a shaving mug with the stenciled name John J. Rice on the bottom. Based upon my last Rice post, there are several John J. Rice named people in my tree so it wasn't initially obvious as to whom it belonged too.

I first did a search of past blog posts thinking I had mulled upon this early and thus most likely wrote about it. But I wasn't able to find one. For a few reasons, I took the bulk of my blog offline a few years back and those posts are backed up in Word documents. I saved a month worth of posts at a time which preserves them but makes them hard to search. I manually opened and scrolled through looking at pictures for five years worth without finding anything. I then found with a click of a box in the options menu, I could search Word documents using File Explorer. But I found the search mechanism to be not too sophisticated and after sifting through a lot of "hits" for awhile, I came to the conclusion that I may have never written about the above shaving mug. 

So...

I decided to look into it again... or possibly for the first time on this blog. I took a picture of the shaving mug first to post on here and noticed the symbols on the face of it. A quick google search showed that it has to do with a fraternal order called the Knights of the Maccabees. The Latin reads, "The stars my camp, the deity my light." The Maccabees were a group of Jewish rebels against the Seleucid Empire described in the Catholic Books of Maccabees. From Wikipedia, it sounds like the group was most active in the late 1800's which narrows it down to belonging to probably one of the John J. Rice's I have in my family tree, the eldest child of Martin Luther Rice, my third great grandfather.

I don't know much about John J. Rice though I have lots of records for him. He was born in 1869 exactly 9 months after his parents were married. He lived with them until becoming an adult and sometime between 1885 and 1900 he moved back east to the community his mom Amanda was from. He stayed there as a boarder and general laborer until sometime before 1915 when he moved to nearby Davenport, Iowa where he would remain for the rest of his days. He worked as a janitor for a telephone company and then a cigar store before late in his life he finally made the title of clerk. He died in 1958 at the age of 88 and was buried back home in western Iowa in the family plot with his parents. He never married. His death notice in the paper was brief and only said that he moved to Davenport 40 years ago though records indicate he was there for at least 58 years. My guess is that being single all his life, his brief death notice was the effort of a friend who didn't know the particular details of his life. 

Evidently though he was active in the Knights of Maccabees and has a stenciled shaving mug to prove it. I found other similar shaving mugs online with the stenciled names of other members so they must have been obtained as part of their membership. Below is a small ladle that has always rested inside it and since it looked similar and had the same patina, I thought belonged to the shaving mug. I guess it still might but evidence seems to indicate it doesn't. The shaving mug has an Austria stamp on the bottom and the ladle has a Noritake, Japan stamp. 

So this wasn't the family tree shaking discovery that I thought it was lying in bed a couple hours ago of some family heirloom tying me to Johannes Justus Rice. But it still has a story and still ties to my family tree.