Riverbend Journal

 Not to long ago, we found ourselves down at the farm garden doing some work on a relatively warmish day for this time of year. (One of the few benefits of global warming.) The time was used to spread composted manure that has been aging for a number of years in a pile over both of our plots and to seed one of the plots down with red clover. We did that to force ourselves to cut back our labors to more enjoyable levels in the summer and to add more biomass to the other plot as it rests next summer.  Eventually we would like to create a garden behind our house and begin to transition away from the farm. While we enjoy the space to grow all kinds of things which we can do on the farm, we also don't enjoy the drive that needs to be made every weekend followed by the labor necessary to catch up after spending 7 days away from the garden in whatever weather we happen to have that day, be it cold and rainy or hot and dry. It would be much more enjoyable to maybe work an hour in the ...

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...

 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 se...

I admit I might be a bit biased in this situation as I sit on the school board of my child's private school. But I prefer to look at it as I can see it in a way that most other Iowan's can't. What is at issue is some recently passed legislation that is now on our governor's desk to sign, establishing bank accounts for every child in Iowa with the amount of money that is typically doled out for every child in Iowa by our government and paid for with our taxes. It amounts to just less than $7600 per student. As it gets phased in over the next three years, it will essentially allow parents to decide where that money goes, i.e. if your child goes to the local public school, they will get that money and if your child goes to a private school, they will get that money. Unused money will always go to the local public school and for every child already in private school, the public school will still get $1200 given to them. On the face of it, it sounds like a pretty fair things...

When I last wrote about this story, I was seeking the father of my 3rd great grandfather Martin Luther Rice. I could find a Martin L. Rice age 7, listed in the 1850 U.S. Federal Census living in Indiana with his parents Justus and Barbara Rice along with 4 other siblings, notably a Justus (Jr.) age 8 and Peter N. Rice age 5.  In the 1860 U.S. Federal Census, Justus (Sr.) and Barbara Rice were living in Stephenson County, Illinois with four more children, none of which were the five listed in the 1850 census. Three of them are under the age of 10 so were born within the last decade and one, Washington Rice, age 14 could have been omitted from the 1850 Census or belonged to a close relative. I have yet to find an 1860 U.S. Federal Census record for Martin L. Rice. Then in the 1870 U.S. Federal Census, I have found a record for Martin who is now living in Clinton, Iowa with two of his brothers Justus and Peter N. Rice. So to sum up all those dates and figures, I have one record possib...