Samuel Bell was one of the fourth generation of Bells whom I have found in and around Retford, Nottinghamshire.
Samuel was seventeen when his father died. He may have been the oldest child left at home and would have had to take care of his mother and his four younger siblings. The youngest, Jeremiah, was then eight years old.
Three years later Samuel married Jane Bingham at Sturton le Steeple just a few kilometres from his family home. They would live here all their lives and in the course of the next twenty-six years would have eight or nine children. I am undecided about the last child, Jane, born in 1813. If she was their daughter, it would probably mean that their second child, Jane, born in 1790, had died in infancy.
However, I would be very glad if this assumption was wrong. Perhaps the Jane born in 1813 was the daughter of their son Samuel, who would have been eighteen by then.
Samuel died in 1828 at the age of sixty. His wife Jane only survived him by three months. She was fifty-eight and did not live to see the birth of her grand-daughter and namesake, our ancestor Jane.
Father of John Bell and son of Jonathan and Elizabeth Bell
Baptised on 1 April 1767 at North Wheatley, Nottinghamshire
Married Jane Bingham on 28 May 1787
Buried 15 January 1828