Hello Jill
Thank you for contacting me. Jim Bell (has some posts on this thread) is very interested in this Bell family (the butcher), though not related. I will alert him to this message.
My interest in the Bells is to see if it is possible to discover whether or not they really did keep the money collected for Robert Crighton in America. There was apparently something about this in the Glasgow magazine the Bailie around 1879, but I haven't been able to track it down yet. If your husband has the article, I would be very pleased to know.
Clare Abbott