With a Name Like Justus, It Should Be Easy

 I debated on whether to do another post on the Rice family, especially this one which doesn't have anything to do with my Rice family (yet), but in the end, I decided to. It is a good lesson on how easy it is to make assumptions based upon location and also how easy it is to just click those "green leaves" and create a terribly tangled up family tree on Ancestry. So please indulge me with one last post... I think.

With a name like Johannes Justus Rice, I thought my search for answers would be easy. Give me that name over John Smith (of which I have two so named in my family tree) any day. But it has turned out to be anything but easy. Other than the marriage record, my Justus Rice mainly stuck to using the name Justus in the slim paper trail I have managed to trace. So I began to broaden my search radius under that name, initials, and commonalities and was quickly rewarded. I found all kinds of information about a John Justus Rice in Freeport, Illinois. A quick google search confirmed that Freeport is in Stephenson county, Illinois, the very county my Justus Rice passed through and where several of his children were borne. 

In fact, there were so many records it was nearly impossible to keep track of them accurately and so I did a newspaper article search in hopes of finding clarification and was rewarded.

In the above article and a second one I didn't include, three generations of this Rice family were identified in enough detail to identify which records belonged to whom. The main focus of this article was a John Justus Rice. Johannes and John are sometimes used interchangeably between immigrating Germans looking to Americanize themselves and indeed my third great grandfather Johannes Kuck used John exclusively upon his arrival to America. So it would be easy to assume that this John Justus Rice and my Johannes Justus Rice were one in the same, especially living in the same town around the same times but details matter in this case.

This John Justus was born in 1822 where mine was born around 1813. This one married a Catharine where mine married a Barbara. Both have sons named Justus (insert initial) Rice. This one lived past 1910 while mine died before 1880. So they can't be the same but I'm fairly certain they are closely related.

It is just two much of a coincidence to have two Rice families in the same area with generations of children bearing the names of John and Justus. Mine Justus has a child named John Justus Rice after all! Before assumption get made, they aren't the same as the one in my tree married a Susan, not a Catherine. So I'm guessing these two are related somehow which makes other details in the above article intriguing. 

The above written about John Justus Rice immigrated from Germany in 1822 and the article names their home as Frielendorf, Ranich Reich, Kranz Tzelgenhein, Cassel, Germany. I haven't yet researched that name but it sounds darn right specific. I am able to located other records for this John and surprise, surprise, his father sometimes went by John and sometimes Justus. That John/Justus was born around 1782 which isn't ideal as it means he was 40 years old when his son was born. I go back to the age thing I mentioned a handful of posts ago. But with men, it was common for them to bury wives who died during childbirth and remarry, often times to younger women. Census records aren't any help for me in this case as census records at that time didn't specify names of wives or children and are only tickmarks on a sheet, IF and I emphasize the IF, one can identify which Justus Rice is your Justus Rice and with so many floating around, I can't. 

So my theory as of now is that John/Justus Rice, father of the man in the article above is probably the father of my Johannes Justus Rice which would make John Justus Rice in the article his brother and my distant Uncle, assuming I am related as I now think. That would make John/Justus my 5th great grandfather. But before I can claim any of that, I need to do a lot more digging and any will take a fair about of time with so much lack of imagination this family had when it came to naming their children!