Notes on the Family History of the Rices
by Leona Evelyn Rice Crawford

The people whom I can claim for ancestors came from varied places and came with different skills.

My father claimed to be English, Irish, Spanish, and Welsh and my mother claimed to be English and Pennsylvania Dutch though what other groups they may have a "trace of" only our Good God knows.  My Father's mother's parents both came from Ireland (and census records affirm this).  Her Father was a Clements and her mother was a Fisher.  At what age they arrived in America or if they were married when they came is not known.  But they were married in 1850 and were living in Raynsborough (now Rainsboro) Ohio, Highland County.  In the 1860 census my Grandmother (Lizzie Clements) Rice was recorded as being one of their children.  It was Elizabeth then, but their marriage license (at Lyndon, Kansas, Courthouse record) shows that she was "Lizzie" when she married.  She was a short, more than pleasingly plump lady.  I was only 1 1/2 years old when she died, but my sister, Fern, 11 years older than I, says that she taught her how to crochet, embroidery, how to cook a little and was a wonderful Grandmother.  Her parents had left Highland County Ohio and came to Kansas when my Grandmother was a young woman.  They had a home near Williamsburg.  My grandfather bought a farm between Williamsburg and Pomona and, well, as the young will, they found each other and married at Lyndon in 1881 and started and reared a family.

My father's great grandfather Rice is said to have been a Welshman who was thrown into an English debtors prison when he was quite young.  He was apprenticed to a merchant ship to serve out his prison term.  A common practice of the English government at that time.  Why was he in prison?  A debt.  Why was he in debt and for what?  I don't know, but again it was common practice to put people in prison for a small (or a large) debt at that time.  It is said that he worked so hard and lived under such filthy conditions that when the ship got to New Orleans he jumped ship and headed north as fast as he could go.  He found work along the way to keep himself alive and a few years later he came to Orange County, New York State, where he settled and married.  (Now all this is a family told tail, told to me by various family members, but I can't verify it.  But at least it makes a good story.)  Into this home my father's grandfather, Cornelius Boneparte Rice, was born.  Whether there were other children or not I don't know.  When he was 2 years old his parents were "taken by an Epidemic".  Was it flu, small pox, black plague??? I have no idea.  It is said that my grandfather was taken and raised by a family named Munn.  When he was 12 years old, he at least thought being mistreated (what 12 year old doesn't think he is mistreated), so he ran away from the Munn family and since he was a tall healthy lad, he got a job as a cabin boy on a freighter and it is my understanding that it sailed to the West Indies, during which time Cornelius added the name Boneparte to his name as thru reading and hearing, Napoleon Boneparte became his hero.  After he got back from the West Indies, he served a tour in some government ship -- was it a Navy, Marines, Coast Guard?? -- I don't know.  He then settled in Georgetown in the District of Columbia and had a grocery and operated a ferry boat across the Potomac River (this is verified by the U.S. census of 1850).  The Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 gave veterans of the U.S. Government the right to land in Kansas, so with a wife and a half dozen or more children, he left his home in District of Columbia and started for Black Jack in Kansas.  He had married Jane Mozingo whose family lived in Wheeling, Virginia, so they went there first.

Now the Mozingo family were an early family of the United States.  They had settled in Eastern Virginia and were said to be Castilian Spanish.  It is recorded in military records that some of the Mozingoes received Revolutionary War pensions.  (According to 1790 records.)  My great grandmother Jane Elizabeth Mozingo was either born in West Moreland county Eastern, Va. or in West Moreland County, Pa, which is next to Wheeling, (now) W. Va.  I talked to a Mozingo from a phone booth at Wheeling one time (still Mozingo's there) and he said he thought several families of the Mozingoes came to Wheeling area about 1820.  It is said that my great great grandmother had taken her daughter and son to D.C. so that her daughter, Jane, could go to a music school there.  She met my great grandfather and when love flew in her education flew out the window.

After visiting with family at Wheeling (they had left D.C. in March), they purchased a flat boat and sailed down the Ohio River until it met the Mississippi and then plied the waters up the Mississippi to St. Louis.  In St. Louis they purchased horses and wagons as they had heard they were hard to get in Kansas, and another flat boat to carry them on -- then up the Missouri to Westport landing. (Kansas City, Mo)  They then sold the boats and went overland to Blackjack.  Blackjack was just east of Baldwin in what is now Douglas Co.  It was July by then.  How did they live that first year there?  Could they still raise a garden?  I do not know that.  Jane Mozingo's brother came with them.  I do know that he shoed horses (on the Santa Fe Trail as Black Jack was) for a living.  His name was Gideon Samuel Mozingo.  I know she, great grandmother Jane, must have been "some woman" to survive a journey like that with all those children.  I think my grandfather was born in Kansas just the next year after they got there.  Uncle Gideon left Kansas at some point to shoe horses for a wagon train to Santa Fe.  He also was a courier of mail on the Santa Fe Trail, too, and went to Colorado to seek gold.  Fern says he was a gentle old man and died at my grandfather Rice's house when she was 4 or 5 years old.  She remembered him.  Great-grandmother's life must have been an adventure (filled with hardships) after she got to Kansas, too.  The battle of Blackjack (the 1st battle of the Civil War in Kansas) was in 1856.  They arrived in 1857, but skirmishes between north and south sympathizers occurred regularly throughout the time till 1864.  It is said that one skirmish occurred on my great grandfather's farm.  Men from both sides were wounded.  They were brought to my grandmother's house -- men from both sides -- to be patched up before taking them home!  After the civil war, the Mozingo family sent an old black man and woman to my great-grandparents to keep as they had no place to go.  The old man and woman had been house servants for Jane Mozingo's parents.  After the war the young Negroes were freed and could get work, but old black people were homeless.  This man and woman had been in the Mozingo household all of Jane's life and so she took them in.  They lived in a shed near their house.  It caused friction in the neighborhood.  Some wanted them to leave the area (no Blacks allowed).  Others felt that my grandparents were keeping slaves.  Within a couple or three years they died.  It must have been terrible for them, the old couple, living in a strange land with not one person who wanted them except my great grandparents.  They were old but I imagine that their death was hastened by a broken heart.  Slavery is wrong, but in many instances in the South, the slaves became almost family members.  My great grandmother was reported to have said that from the time she was born this black woman had cared for her.

At some point my grandparents moved to a farm near Wellsville in Franklin County.  They are buried in Baldwin's Oak Lawn (?) Cemetery at the south edge of Baldwin.  Several of the Rice's family are buried there including my Grandfather and Grandmother George & Lizzie (Clements) Rice.  Grandpa & Grandma (George & Lizzie) had lived in the Williamsburg-Pomona area many years after their marriage.  They had 2 sets of twins and a boy and a girl who were born singly.  Uncle Lem, the single-born boy, had one single born boy and 2 sets of twins.  None of these twins were identical.  My Father, Jesse, was a twin with a sister, Besse.

In later years Grandpa decided to move west and moved to Ness County, Ks. on a treeless prairie to a sod house, so different from the home in Franklin County.  I wonder how my Grandmother could have stood it.  My grandfather had a stroke followed by flu and died.  My grandmother died a few years later with a series of strokes.  It had been a very unwise move that had brought heartache to both of them.  I was born in that sod house about 1 1/2 or 2 years before my grandmother died.

Pictures

1. Cornelius Bonaparte Rice.  In this photo he was wearing his glass eye in.
2. Jane Mozingo Rice
3. Jesse Rice, Lizzie Clements Rice (mother), Besse Rice, Lemual (Lem) Rice (standing), Irene Rice (in front), Nora Rice, George Lewis Rice, Dora Rice.
4. Left to right: Besse, Lem (Lemuel), Dode (Dora), Irene, Jesse, None (Nora).  The children of George Lewis and Lizzie Rice.
5. Standing, left to right: Jesse Rice, Cathrine Harrison Rice (Jesse's wife), Besse Rice Hackett, None Rice, Agnes Miller Rice (Lem's wife), Lem Rice.  Sitting, left to right: Dode Rice, George Lewis Rice (father), Elizabeth Hackett (Homer & Besse's daughter), Irene Rice. This photo was taken in May or June of 1909.  This date was provided by Leona Rice Crawford.