Martha Nix Wade
American actress

Martha Nix Wade (born September 26, 1967) is an American actress, best known for her roles as Janice Horton on the NBC daytime soap opera Days of Our Lives and Serena Burton on the CBS drama The Waltons.
Personal life
Born on September 26, 1967 in Orange County, California, Wade began acting at an early age. At age 7, she landed the role of Janice Horton on the NBC daytime soap opera Days of Our Lives. While experiencing success as a child actress, Wade was being sexually molested by a neighbor. She details how she overcame the abuse in her 2011 autobiography, My Secret Life: A Truthful Look at a Child Actor's Victory Over Sexual Abuse. She and her husband, Gary, are the parents of 2 children. On January 15, 2021, Martha and Gary's son, Ryder, was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident as he was leaving water polo practice at Concordia University of Irvine. The family has established the Ryder Wade Foundation to distribute income for charitable purposes.
A Quarter Blue
In 2007, Wade created the not-for-profit organization A Quarter Blue, with the goals of stopping childhood sexual abuse through education and empowering survivors to begin the process of healing. Based in Orange, California, A Quarter Blue offers resources and training opportunities.
“Martha Nix Wade” enters the record as american actress. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Martha, Wade and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6774510. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1967, 2011, 2021 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Martha Nix Wade” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.