Robert Bell was born between 1520 and 1539 in England. He married three times and had twelve children. Descendants and relatives lived mainly in England and Virginia.

Roy Wheeler Bell, son of William Edward Bell and Mary Ann Wheeler, was born in 1897 in Arkansas or Texas. He married Lydia Reola Estes (1900-1950), daughter of Ambrose Wickersham Estes and Mary Bell Noe, in 1922. They had two children. He died in 1958 in Harris County, Texas.

He fought and beheaded three Turkish adversaries in duels. He was sold into slavery, then murdered his master to escape. He sailed under a pirate flag, was shipwrecked and marched to the gallows to be hanged, only to be reprieved at the eleventh hour. And all this happened before he was thirty years old. This is Captain John Smith’s life. Everyone knows the story of Pocahontas, and how in 1607 she saved John Smith. And were it not for Smith’s leadership, the Jamestown colony would surely have failed. Yet Smith was a far more ambitious explorer and soldier of fortune than these tales suggest – and a far more ambitious self-promoter, too. Now, in this first new major biography of Smith in decades, award-winning BBC filmmaker and author Peter Firstbrook traces the adventurer’s astonishing exploits across three continents, testing Smith’s own writings against the historical and geographical reality on the ground. With A Man Most Driven, Firstbrook delivers a riveting, enlightening dissection of this myth-making man, England’s arrival on the world stage, and the creation of America.

A historical and genealogical book that covers more than a millennium of time with many spellings of the Bell family along with a pattern of their European, English, Scottish and Irish migration movements to North America and the West Indies colonies. --- Compiled from the author's repository of computer notes and facts of over one hundred thousand pages covering over fourteen thousand Bells of many spellings. -- They are descendants of Flemish/Normans who became Nobles, Clan Chiefs, Members of Parliament, Members of Congress, Governors, Bishops, Clergymen, Great Merchants, Worshipful Merchants, and Indentured Servants. -- Bell's were active as powerful Speaker of The House of Commons, Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer to the Queen, Virginia Company of London Charter Signers, Fierce Border Reivers, Explorers, Inventors, Colony Settlers, Plantation Owners, Headrights, Soldiers, Military Officers, American Patriots, Transported Undesirables, Slave Owners, and a Presidential Candidate. -- They were ancestors of the present day English Crown. --- This is an attractive and scholarly book whose authors have compiled a timeline of several Bell bloodlines, their many Coat of Arms and other family events from ca. 820 AD to ca. 1800. -- Today many family researchers can often trace their ancestors to ca. 1800, this book may help them to find earlier kinship. --- The unique style of compiling, sequencing, writing and cramming thousands of orderly facts is a first for established family archivists and researchers, yet is easy for beginners to follow. -- Hundreds of other books that list related Bell families after 1800 are referenced. -- The index of about 7000 other than Bell surnames, often related, may be of interest to non Bell researchers.

From Tyler's quarterly historical and genealogical magazine.