IN SEARCH OF PETER BELL: THE SCOT HYPOTHESIS

IN SEARCH OF PETER BELL: THE SCOT HYPOTHESIS

A comment was recently posted on the piece Obama and the Bells:

Mark said...
I've noticed that you're a descendant of captain Peter Bell and was wondering if you could give me your take on what I've heard. I heard a few years ago that the brothers Peter and Anthony Bell were actually from Scotland and were only residing in Germany just before coming to Maryland. I haven't been able to verify this but it could be plausible if they were part of the thousands that left Scotland after "the '45". This was the last of the Jacobite rebellions and the one in which the movement was utterly crushed at the battle of Culloden, resulting in the exodus of tens of thousands out of Scotland and northern England. Most ended up in Europe and a lot ended up in Germany. A huge portion of these people had military experience and that could explain why Peter Bell became a captain in the revolution so quickly. I always thought it unusual that two not-so-young unmarried brothers would just pick up and leave Germany for America. Also the Bells have a very long history in Scotland. I hope to find some evidence of the history of these two brothers some day but am becoming very discouraged.
June 20, 2009 1:13 PM

As far as I have been able to tell, the first statement of what I call the “Scot hypothesis” was advanced by Colonel Fielder M.M. Beall in Colonial Families of the United States Descended from the Immigrants: Bell, Beal, Bale, Beale, Beall (1927). The putative genealogical basis for this claim involved, among other things, the undocumented assumptions that: (1) the father of Anthony and Peter Bell was also named Anthony; (2) they also had brothers Daniel and Joseph; (3) belonged to a family that had settled in Old Sommerset before 1700. Fielder Beall’s work in this and many other areas has been severely criticized by professional genealogists for the obvious reasons.

Setting aside the faulty work of Fielder Beall, I think that the Scot hypothesis suffers from several major difficulties:

Religion: Peter and Anthony Bell are associated in every aspect of their documented history with the Evangelical Lutheran Church. They took communion as a condition of naturalization in that church. Peter Bell married the daughter of Johann Friederich Vogeler, one of the constitutional founders of St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hagerstown, under which Peter Bell was buried. (The signature of a Johann Friederich Vogeler also appears earlier in 1747 as a founder of the Monocacy Evangelical Lutheran Church near Frederick, Maryland.) Anthony Bell and Peter’s oldest son Frederick were prominent contributors and officials within the Evangelical Lutheran Church founded in part from their contributions in Leitersburg. Frederick Bell also contributed to the establishment and maintenance of other Evangelical Lutheran Churches and even the churches of other dissident protestant sects, such as the Mennonites. It seems unlikely to me (though not impossible) that soldiers formerly fighting for a Catholic king would be so deeply immersed in the establishment of an evangelical protestant sect.

Language: The language of church, school and partly the business community of the Bell brothers and their descendants continued to be German until the mid-1800’s. The signatures of Anthony Bell, Johann Friederich Vogeler and Frederick Bell all follow German orthography. I have not yet found an exemplar for the signature of Peter Bell. We know that Frederick Bell had, for the time, a rather extensive library and subscribed to a German language bible.

Marriages: Anthony took to wife Maria Schneeberger (Snowhill), the German speaking Swiss daughter of Hans Schneeberger, described in Swiss records as a religious fanatic. As noted above, Peter was married to a Vogeler daughter, the other two Vogeler daughters being wed to Leiters, whose father had converted from the Mennonite sect to Evangelical Lutheran. In the next several generations, the offspring, male and female, made marriages within the German speaking community whose ancestors trace back to the Rhineland Palatinate and to the German speaking regions of Switzerland. As far as I have been able to research the other lines, very few marriages occur among the Scot, Irish or English population in the second, third and fourth generations. I would expect a different distribution if the Bell line originated in Scotland, Ireland or England.

Military Experience: Keeping in mind that captains of militia were elected and the ability to outfit and recruit followers often trumped military training, we should not feel compelled to find a military background in either of the Bell brothers. However, if such training existed, it might have come from a closer and more relevant conflict, the French and Indian War which ended almost exactly when the Bell Brothers first appear in colonial records. We know that the Swiss born British mercenary, Colonel Henry Bouquet, recruited his countrymen both at home and after arrival, and then trained and marched the assembled army through Virginia and the western parts of Maryland before engaging for the decisive battles in Pennsylvania. Another notable colonel, George Washington, was also involved in this action and came to have a fairly high estimation of the German speaking soldiers in the command, which carried over to the Revolutionary War. Another tantalizing possibility stems from the existence of a Bell family line descending from the 1709 Palatine migration to the Mohawk Valley in New York. Part of that group was also involved in the Canadian expedition of the French and Indian War. Some of the 1709 families eventually ended up among the Monocacy congregation near Frederick, Maryland, and were among the signers on the constitution of that church. Incidentally, several of those Mohawk Valley families were also involved in the Pennsylvania-Maryland border skirmishes that preceded the establishment of the Mason-Dixon line, which marks the northern boundary of the Bell brothers original homesteads. Perhaps they were part of the felling crew that created the vista through the woods in which they came to reside.

Land Purchase: The Bell brothers purchased their land from Peter Scheiss, another German speaking immigrant who preceded them. Where did they get the money? Anthony Bell may have had access to the proceeds of his wife's Landreit from Canton Bern. Peter Bell bought a larger tract for a larger sum of money. It is also clear from the inventory list of his probated estate that he was some kind of tradesmen and, perhaps, operated a mercantile establishment in addition to his farm, also located adjacent to a major trade/migration route for German speaking populations landing at Philadelphia and moving west and south through the Shenandoah Valley.

Family History: None of the documents contemporary to the Bell brothers hint of any non-Germanic origin or strong association with Scotland or Ireland. The muster rolls for Peter Bell’s and Anthony Bell’s companies are almost devoid of any names that are not clearly traceable to the Palatinate. Those militia companies were adjunct to and may have been subsumed in the German Regiment in the Battles of Brandywine, Paoli and Germantown in the year immediately preceding Captain Peter Bell's death, presumably because of the rigors of the campaign. Subsequent family history prior to 1900 by one descendant points to Alsace. The best overall (though sometimes mistaken) account by Herbert Bell in The History of the Leitersburg District refers to Peter Bell as coming from Germany as a young man and says that Anthony Bell learned his trade in Weisbaden, but neglects to mention the name of the trade.

Bell Pottery and Housing: Shenandoah red ware, a variation of which at least three of the Bells in the second generation significantly advanced, had its origin in the Palatinate. It seems doubtful to me, but not impossible, that Scot soldiers of fortune or exiles might have picked up the knack and become sufficiently skillful to advance and pass on the technology to the succeeding generations. More likely, given the similarity to pottery glazing techniques associated with the Strasbourg area, the craft was learned there at some level, and came with the Bell brothers to Maryland. As to the original home of Peter Bell, which still stands on Bell’s Choice just south of the Mason-Dixon Line, it embodies the classical German stone construction found in the Rhineland and throughout Maryland German settlements. The house was, according to Herbert Bell, begun by Peter and completed by oldest son Frederick.

OBAMA AND THE BELLS

OBAMA AND THE BELLS

In connection with Barrack Obama’s primary season sojourn abroad and mass rally in Germany, genealogists got busy. They traced his ancestry to a certain Peter Gutknecht, a German-speaking farmer who emigrated to Pennsylvania from the Alsace region in 1743. So did the Bells, probably sometime between 1750 and 1755. If only he had known when Hillary used her Pennsylvania connection to out maneuver him in that particular primary!
So are the Bells and Obama related through Peter Gutknecht? Probably, but not close enough to get excited about. Think about the math and you will see why. Dick and Doris had five children. Dick’s parents had 5 (excluding 6 step-siblings and 1 half brother), and Doris’ parents had four. In the next preceding generation, Elizabeth Guelff came from a family of 14, with 9 surviving to adulthood and having children. Dudley Bell came from a family of five children (four living to adulthood), but his parents, Albert Bell and Elizabeth Metzger came from families of 5 and 11 respectively. The Metzgers were Pennsylvania Dutch, i.e. their ancestors (Repogles, Neffs, Koernig and Hummels) came from a German-speaking region before they emmigrated to Pennsylvania and northwestern Maryland. In all cases this region happened to be along the lower Rhine River, i.e. Alsace. Albert Bell was the son of Samuel Bell and Elizabeth Smith, who moved to Hagerstown, Wayne County, Indiana from the Hagerstown area of Washington County, Maryland. In the next Bell generation -- Frederick Bell and Susanna Emerick 11 children blessed their marriage (in addition to 3 from Frederick first marriage). This series of “begats” in reverse gets us to the founding Bell generations -- Peter Bell and Elizabeth Vogeler. Friederich Vogeler, Elizabeth’s father, also probably came from the Rhineland. The Emerick, Repogle, Koernig lines? All Pennsylvania Dutch and the typical family size of surviving children in the 5 to 10 range.
From this point back, assuming child-producing families in accordance with the norm, we are looking at 5 to 10 children per generation that survive and have children of their own. Given the math, and assuming the math is the same for Obama ancestors, it would be hard not to find a link with Peter Gutknecht. Not surprisingly, the gene pool includes such other notables as the ancestors of Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and Herbert Hoover. All three family names connect at some attenuated point with the Bells and the families that they married into.
Some who do family histories become obsessed with these tangential connections to historical figures. Many feel that such provenance gives rise to some kind of bragging rights. From my point of view, the ordinary people are far more interesting, and in certain respects, far more heroic. After all, they were the ones called upon, more often than not, to make the heavy sacrifices. Those who history remembers are the survivors and especially those who leave behind a trove of written records. Presidential candidates (successful and not) fit this category.
On a second note, much in the campaign was about identity politics – more about who is like us than who is likely to lead well. That is the politics of division, unfortunately practiced with a vengeance by both political parties. At the same time both candidates postured as uniters. In our history, politicians who have transcended political division have been quite rare. Uniquely, George Washington remained above the fray for his entire presidency. Lincoln nearly got to that point (but only for half of the divided country) near the end of his life after leading us into and through the most violently divisive time in our history. No others, in my opinion, have a legitimate claim to such a mantle. Notwithstanding the rhetoric, it will be extraordinarily difficult for anyone to make it a list of three.
We know that Obama finds inspiration in the words and actions of Lincoln. Indeed, Obama may be a match for Lincoln as a wordsmith and quite likely will surpass him as an orator. Will time and press of events allow a great leader to emerge and withstand the inexorable erosion of the political process? Will he continue to draw support from all of his genealogically connected groups?
A final historical note on identity politics: Benjamin Franklin had a decisively negative view of German speaking immigrants. In part, his prejudice arose from some frustration in raising troops to protect the Pennsylvania frontier during the French and Indian War from a population that included a large number of Quaker (and other sects) with firm pacifist beliefs. Washington had a different point of view, serving under Colonel Bouquet (German Swiss) in a highly successful military operation consisting mostly of German speaking soldiers that, among other things, rescued Washington’s military reputation from a stain that it received in a failed prior expedition under the command of General Braddock. In the Revolutionary War, Washington’s personal security and honor guard consisted entirely of Germans. He did not entirely trust the English speaking population.