Irish Paternal Roots: Patrick Rice And Mary Sloan
On Dan’s paternal side, the family reaches back to Patrick Rice and Mary Sloan, Irish immigrants who came to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century and eventually settled in the Great Lakes region.
By 1900, Chicago had one of the largest Irish populations in America. Irish families like the Rices were deeply woven into the city’s working economy, from canal and dock work to municipal jobs and river traffic.
Patrick and Mary’s son, the 1859 Daniel, followed that pattern. He made his living on tugboats along the Chicago River, part of the maritime infrastructure that moved grain, lumber, and other commodities in and out of the city’s bustling harbor.This side of the family is the source of the Rice name and the Irish Catholic identity that appears consistently in later burial and philanthropic records.
German Maternal Roots: Schnaitmann And Becker Families
Dan’s mother, Wilhelmina “Minnie” Schnaitmann (1865–1944), was born in Chicago to Johann Schnaitmann and Carolina Becker, both immigrants from Germany.
By the late nineteenth century, Chicago’s German population was one of the largest in the United States. German immigrants dominated certain North-Side and West-Side neighborhoods, brought strong craft and trade traditions, and often maintained their language, associations, and Catholic or Lutheran parishes.
In this context, Minnie grew up as part of a substantial German-American community. Her marriage to tugboat engineer Daniel F. Rice in Chicago united two major immigrant streams in the city: Irish and German, both rooted in working-class life and both accustomed to building opportunity a paycheck at a time.
A Working-Class Chicago Household
The Rice household on Hudson Street was not affluent. Dan’s father worked physically demanding river jobs, and the family was raising six children in a city that was still very much an industrial boomtown.Key family facts that the historical record supports:
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Parents: Daniel F. Rice (tugboat worker) and Wilhelmina “Minnie” Schnaitmann Rice.
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Children: Six in total, five surviving into adulthood, including: Walter T. Rice, Joseph J. Rice, Florence E. Rice, and Daniel Francis Rice (the youngest).
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Father’s death: Daniel (1859–1916) died when Dan was about 20, leaving the family without its primary wage earner.
Obituaries for Joseph J. Rice identify him as a partner in Daniel F. Rice & Co., confirming that at least two of Minnie’s sons moved from that tugboat-world upbringing into the Chicago financial sector.
The leap from river work to commodity brokerage makes more sense when you remember what Chicago was at the time: a grain and freight hub where anyone who understood the docks and the flow of goods had an intuitive grasp of markets.
Gaps In The Official Record
One reason researchers have to lean on family documents, cemetery records, and local histories is that Illinois did not require centralized registration of births and deaths until 1916. Before that, counties might record events, but compliance was inconsistent, and many births were never formally registered.
The Danada History Committee notes that no official birth certificates have yet been found for:
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Daniel F. Rice (1859–1916)
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His son, Daniel Francis “Dan” Rice (1896–1975)
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The earlier generation in Wisconsin
Instead, their dates and places are reconstructed from church records, cemetery data, census entries, obituaries, and family papers. That is typical for families living in Illinois before the 1916 vital-records mandate
Faith, Education, And Identity
Several strands point to the Rice family’s Catholic identity:
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Burial: Dan and Ada are buried in Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois, which is explicitly operated as a Roman Catholic cemetery of the Archdiocese of Chicago.
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Institutions: The Rice Foundation and the couple’s philanthropy provided major support to Catholic or Catholic-affiliated institutions, notably Benedictine University (a Catholic university where the Dan and Ada Rice Center stands) and various Catholic agencies and hospitals.
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Education: Dan studied at DePaul University and the University of Notre Dame, both Catholic institutions, after attending Chicago public schools.
While personal interior faith is always private, the combination of Catholic schooling, burial in a Catholic cemetery, and sustained support for Catholic institutions strongly indicates that the Rices lived and acted as practicing Roman Catholics, which fits the pattern of many Irish and German Chicago families of their generation.
From Immigrant Roots To Chicago Philanthropists
By the time he and Ada were building Danada Farm and racing Kentucky Derby winner Lucky Debonair, Dan Rice was far removed from his father’s tugboat paychecks in one sense, but not in another. He built his wealth in Chicago’s grain and commodities world, stayed rooted in the city where his parents had struggled, and continued to operate inside the same economic ecosystem that had employed his father, just from the trading floor instead of the wheelhouse.
In short:
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Paternal line: Irish (Rice and Sloan), working the Great Lakes and Chicago River.
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Maternal line: German (Schnaitmann and Becker), part of Chicago’s large German-American community.
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Religious and cultural identity: Functionally Catholic, tied to Irish and German Catholic traditions in Chicago.
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Class background: Solidly working-class, with a father on tugboats and multiple children who climbed into white-collar finance.
That mix of Irish and German immigrant grit, Catholic community structure, and Chicago’s river-and-grain economy is the soil Dan Rice grew out of, and it shaped the work ethic and ambition that later defined his business career and philanthropy.
