Rufus Rice

Father of Mary Abigail (Rice) Ellingwood, as the Ancestry tree has it. His Dearborn County estate (1846) names her and Elijah among his heirs.

A son of James Rice and Abigail Warren, he married Mary Sylvester at Durham, Maine, in 1819, and was at Pownal in the censuses of 1820 and 1830 and at Manchester, Dearborn County, Indiana, in 1840, with a household of ten. His children, as WikiTree gives them: Mary Abigail (1822), George Washington (1824-1894), Nancy M. (1828-1895, Mrs. Dashiell), James H. (1831-1902), John Wesley (1833-1910, who died at Albion, Washington), Lucy Plummer (1835-1919, Mrs. Coon) and Sarah Sylvester (1840-1906, Mrs. Roberts, born at Manchester) (source). He is not the Rufus Rice of Marlborough and Worcester, Massachusetts (1793-1851).

Open questions

• His death. The tree has 28 Sep 1840 in Whiteside County, Illinois; but the estate of "Rufus Rice of Dearborn County", with Mary Abigail and Elijah Ellingwood among his heirs, was administered in Indiana from 1846 (source). Either he died in Indiana by 1846 or the estate was settled years after his death. The research on the wives' families finds him in the 1840 census at Manchester, Dearborn County, and buried at Old Hogan Hill Cemetery there, dying in 1840 (Ellingwood line: the wives' families (Pattullo and Short, Adams and Deyoe, Rice and Sylvester); see Questions to decide). A Maine record gives his birth at Freeport, 16 Jul 1794, to James Rice and Abigail, and he married Mary Sylvester at Durham, Maine, on 10 Oct 1819 (FamilySearch QP7S-1H44 and 2HKF-3SF, indexes as cited on WikiTree).