Ancestors

Nancy R. Rice

Nancy R. Rice was born in Prince Edward County, in the Virginia Southside, a Presbyterian stronghold. Compiled family accounts give her birth as 16 August 1773. She was very probably the daughter of James Rice and his wife Mary, called Polly. Her grandfather, Matthew Rice Sr., held land on the branches of the Sandy River and settled his sons on it. In 1774 he gave her father 160 acres there.

In 1779, when Nancy was about six, her parents sold that farm for £800. The family went to Kentucky and settled in the country around Danville that became Mercer County. There on 12 September 1790 Nancy married Benjamin Spilman, a young man from Culpeper County, Virginia, who had come out with his widowed mother about 1788.

Her father died on 25 January 1794. On his deathbed he asked that his estate be kept together for the support of his children and his wife. He named Nancy's husband and her mother as his executors. Two years earlier Nancy had named her first daughter Mary Rice Spilman, called Polly, after her mother.

The 1879 history of Illinois Presbyterianism that records her says she "was descended from an English family of that name, a family very prolific of ministers": among them "Parson David Rice, ordained 1765, the pioneer Presbyterian minister of Ky.," Dr. John H. Rice of Virginia, and Dr. Nathan L. Rice, who debated Alexander Campbell in 1843. Find a Grave calls her a cousin of David Rice. No record shows how the families were related.

She and Benjamin settled in what became Garrard County, about six miles from Danville. She raised thirteen children there and in the Green River country: five sons and eight daughters. The same history gives her the credit for the sons' careers: "She possessed uncommon strength of mind and energy of character. It was mainly through her influence that her five sons were all liberally educated and prepared for professional life." Two of them became Presbyterian ministers, two physicians, and the fifth a lawyer and then a minister.

In Illinois she was one of the founding members of the Golconda Presbyterian church in October 1819. Her daughter Lucy was married in 1821 to John C. Hanna. About 1836 she and Benjamin moved to Montgomery County, near Hillsboro, where their son Thomas was the minister, and she died there in 1848.

If Nancy R. Rice is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Nancy R. Rice (1773-1848)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/nancy-r-rice-1773-1848-bff9b3.