The Largo Bells
Provided by Dennis Bell of British Columbia
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My grandfather, Alexander Bell, was born in Lower Largo to a fisherman named Andrew Bell and his wife Margaret Clunie, and immigrated to Western Canada around 1912. The reason I know a little about the Selkirks is that Alexander Selkirk went back to sea after he punched out one of my ancestors, Margaret Bell, who was married to his older brother John Selkirk. The whole thing occurred during a Selkirk family (they were actually Selcraigs or Selkrages in those days) drinking bout in Lower Largo. The Largo parish church session records observe that John and Alexander were involved in something called a "drynniefalls," apparently, drink til you fall, which dissolved into a fistfight, during which Margaret tried unsuccessfully to separate the contenders. She took a roundhouse right to the side of the head from Alexander, who then ran away to Cupar and eventually to sea with the privateers who marooned him.

I've done a lot of work tracing the Largo Bells. One of the most prominent is Ninian Bell, born in 1625 in Lower Largo. He got captured by the English at the Battle of Dunbar in 1650 while serving as a cornet in a Scottish cavalry regiment and was deported to the New World as an indentured prisoner of war the following year -- first to Barbados and later to Maryland. In Maryland he eventually became one of the colony's biggest land and slave owners and made all sorts of money from a bunch of tobacco plantations. He founded the town of Upper Marlborough on one of his land tracts in Maryland -- hence, he was the original Marlboro Man, of cigarette fame (or infamy). He is believed to have been the first Ruling Elder of the Presbyterian Church anywhere in the New World and was a noted Indian fighter, ending up as the commanding officer of all of Maryland's military forces in the late 1600s. Ninian once owned the land where the White House now stands in the modern District of Columbia. But it was too swampy to grow tobacco, so he sold it to a gullible Englishman. That tract was called "Beall's Levels" -- the Cromwellians had made him change the spelling of his surname permanently as a condition of indenture. He also owned most of what is now Georgetown, today worth billions and billions of dollars. He named that tract Rock of Dumbarton, one of his favourite places in Scotland which he came to know while travelling with his father James, a prominent Church of Scotland figure who obtained a Doctor of Divinity degree from Glasgow University around 1640. There is still a huge mansion in Georgetown now owned by one of the universities named Dumbarton Oaks, where the first formative meetings of the United Nations were held back in 1944.

When Ninian died in 1717 his very large estate was divided among a bunch of his sons. Before Washington city was created, his heirs named the area Georgetown -- the English were flattered, thinking the settlement along the Potomac was named in honour of one of their dimwitted German kings, the Americans have always thought that Georgetown gots its monicker from George Washington. Wrong. The Bell/Beall family named the place after one of Ninian's favourite grandchildren, George Beall, and thought it was a tremendous practical joke to play on the English, who adopted the name instantly Not only that. One of Ninian Bell's uncles or granduncles, a man named William Bell, was an ancestor of Alexander Graham Bell, moving from Largo to St. Andrews where he launched a branch of the family which eventually gave rise to the inventor, born in Edinburgh. I visited Lower Largo briefly in 1990 during a vacation in Britain with my Scottish-born wife (she's from Port Glasgow rather than Fife, but I forgive her).

Unfortunately, I wasn't doing family research back then, and knew nothing about all these characters. So I didn't do much else but wander around town in the pouring rain and guzzle a few fine Scottish ales in the terrific pub at the Crusoe Hotel on Largo Bay. Most of my recent Bell ancestors seem to have originated in the Drummochy end of Largo, in the houses close to the dock.. I've since found a few Bell cousins now living in Lower Largo and environs, along with Clunies all over the world, some as far away as Mississippi and Australia. I've never been able to identify the exact house or location in Lower Largo that the Bell family called home in the late 1500s and early 1600s. But I can hardly wait to make a return visit to Largo parish to take a stab at it.

dennis bell in british columbia

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