Notes & Excerpts on Rice Brothers, Descendants, & Allied Families (ePub)

William Rice served the equivalent of four tours of duty during the Revolutionary War. First was service in the Culpeper Minute Men Battalion, 1775-1776. The second tour was in the Northern Campaign from Feb. 12, 1776 for two years and he was discharged on February 12, 1778, at Valley Forge. He enlisted a third time for two years and was discharged August 22, 1780, in Richmond, Virginia after serving in the Southern Campaign. And, fourth, he served twice in the Fauquier County Militia for three months or more and was discharged after the Siege of Yorktown in October 1781. This work presents a first time account of approximately 18,000 descendants with over 250,000 related items of data. Many of William's descendants lived in Bedford, Giles, and surrounding counties in Virginia; and Monroe, Summers, Raleigh, and Fayette Counties in West Virginia. This work does not discuss living descendants. The central and dominant quest of this inquiry has always been to find the father of William Rice and Bailey Rice based upon Nathaniel J. Rice's biographical statement that his great-grandfather was killed at Braddock's Defeat on July 9, 1755. During Braddock's Defeat approximately, 456 soldiers and officers of 800, supplemented with new enlistments of the Virginia troops, were massacred, along with 385 wounded, by the French and Indians and left where they fell to this day. As mysterious as it may seem there are no known records, rosters, regimental histories, or muster rolls of the Virginia Regiments or soldiers who participated in Braddock's Defeat, perhaps, to deter the widows from filing claims against a fragile and insolvent government. However, there are known and extant records for the Battle of Great Meadows preceding Braddock's Defeat and other military actions immediately after Braddock's Defeat, but nothing for Braddock's Defeat.