WHAT ABOUT THE BELLS?

This genealogical quest had three beginnings. The first was over 40 years ago in a time before search engines, the World Wide Web, personal computers, digital cameras, cell phones, FAX machines, electronic databases ... well, you get the picture. The primary investigative tools for the family detective were no more sophisticated than those available to Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. Musty libraries, government archives, the memories of aging parents and grandparents, old Kodak pictures, family Bibles, the carved-in-stone repositories of dates from the family plot and old letters.

My favorite aunt, Lucille Christle, first got the bug, probably not long after the devastating flash flood that wiped out her home on the banks of Rapid Creek in 1972.* Aunt Lucille and Uncle Richard had only a few minutes warning from the time the Pictola Dam burst and the wall of water inundated their home, moving it off of its foundation. Most of the family albums, along with everything else they owned, was swept away or irreparably damaged. Aunt Lucille set about retrieving what she could and then contacting relatives everywhere to get copies of what she could not salvage.

Even before the flood, Aunt Lucille and Uncle Richard traveled quite a bit around the United States, attending various Elderhostel** events. These travels took them to and through places where distant relatives lived. The seminars appealed especially to Lucille who was something of an autodidact. She also started and kept up a correspondence with relatives they met.

Perhaps on one of these trips or because of the correspondence, Aunt Lucille found out that her grandfather Albert Bell had enlisted in the Union Army. Naturally, she wrote to the National Archives and got back from them photocopies of his military records. She then re-copied and circulated them to family members, including my mother Doris Bell.

Aunt Lucille passed away in 1984 before she had been able to peel another generational layer of family history. Even in her last illness, though, she and Uncle Richard managed to make one last trip to Helena, Montana in August of 1983 to attend my wedding, and in her very calm and direct way to say good bye, still very interested and curious to know everything about our plans and where life was headed next.

The second beginning happened in the midst of a family crisis in 1989. My wife suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage while at work. These stroke-like events are often fatal within the first few minutes, and probably would have been in this case but for the proximity of George Washington University Medical Center,*** a very astute and clear-headed supervisor and a very quick response to a 911 call by a paramedic team.

My mother got on the first plane from Helena to Washington, DC, planning to stay indefinitely to help out with the care of our three year old son and, as it turned out, the first several months of a lengthy convalescence after my wife came out of a two week coma. Both to pass the time and to take our minds off the possibility that yet another generation would come to age without one parent, Mom began to organize family pictures and to write-out dates, names and places of all the extended family that she kept in touch with over the years.

Later the same year, Mom and I made a trip to the National Archives and to the Maryland Archives to see if we could find out anything more about Albert Bell. After a few hours of winding and re-winding microfilm, we thought we had him connected to a Samuel Bell, who was living near Hagerstown, Wayne, Indiana before the Civl War. This did not seem, at the time, to fit with the family story that the Bells were Pennsylvania Dutch. Mom went back to Helena, and we returned to the frenetic professional life of DC.

After Dad passed away in 1993, Mom sold the house in Helena and moved down to Salt Lake to live with Donna. Mom continued to get letters and inquiries from various branches of the family about who was living where, doing what and so on. Not until much later, after she had a stroke in early 2000 that significantly affected her short term memory, did I find out that she had made a couple of trips to the LDS Family History Library. One of the many knowledgeable and friendly volunteers there had helped her begin to organize her notes on family data history forms. These meticulously completed forms, along with a treasure trove of other information, had been stored in an old Samsonite briefcase and some shoeboxes in her closet.

Typical of Mom, she decided that she would recover from the stroke in time to attend my wedding to Roslyn set for July 16, 2000. And this she did with the devoted care and attention of Donna, Virginia, Terry and Perrylee, a sort of recovery commando team. They were joined by Pat for the final airlift operation from Salt Lake City to Washington, DC.

Over time, Mom gradually regained her ability to talk, but the short term memory problem persisted, making it nearly impossible to have a meaningful conversation, especially since we were mostly restricted to long distance telephone calls. When it came out later, the movie Fifty First Dates*** perfectly illustrated the problem.

Later that year, I made a change to my AOL subscription, which triggered an offer of 90 days free use of Ancestry.com. It's free, so I thought "why not?" To get started, I called up Mom to see if I could get some basic names and dates. Then came the surprise -- she remembered almost everything from ten to 70 years ago as though it happened yesterday! Now we could talk!

When I reported this to Donna, she remembered seeing something stored away in Mom's closet that might be helpful. Virginia also remembered helping Mom prepare some of those family group sheets. And so the third phase of the quest got underway, combining the pencil and paper labor from the 80's and 90's with the high tech developments of the 21st Century.

Mom drove the search until she passed away in August 2005. After each weekly report on some new bit of information on one line of the family or another, she would always come back to the question "What about the Bells?" She continues to drive the search today as I hear her voice asking that same persistent question every time I fire up the search engine.

I heard it again last weekend after my son and I attended services at St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hagerstown, Maryland,***** where Captain Peter Bell (1736-1778), a fifth great grandfather, rests in peace under the western foundation of the church that his father-in-law, Johann Friederick Vogeler helped to establish in 1769.




* For pictures of the flood's aftermath go to http://sd.water.usgs.gov/projects/1972flood/photos.html.

** http://www.elderhostel.org/.

*** Among other things, the GWU Medical Center is famous for treating President Reagan after the assassination attempt and Vice-president Chaney for his heart problems. http://www.gwumc.edu/.

****http://movies.aol.com/movie/50-first-dates/15418/main?flv=1&ncid=yInozwVMCu0000000742&icid=rbox_movie_titles.

***** http://stjohnsfamily.org/.