REF Transcript of register of St. John's Piscataway Parish, Pr.= Geo., = Co., Md. Hist. Soc.. folios 288-289. = BEALL Members of the Beall family, that is, Ninian, Thomas, Alexander= , James and Robert, were natives of St. Andrew's Parish, Fifeshire, Scotland, where their births or baptisms are registered in the paris= h archives. The naming of their Maryland plantations also attested to their Scottish heritage. The Scottish spelling was "Bell" and was so= used in early Maryland records. Why "a" was inserted is unknown, but= after the first generation Beall was consistently used by all member= s of the family. = The Scottish research was conducted by the late Alexander Graha= m Bell who invented the telephone and phonograph, although he was not = a scion of the Fifeshire. = REF: Research by Alexander Graham Beall at the Library of Congress; Parish Register of St. Andrew's, Fifeshire, Registration House, Edinburgh. = P added info on the town of Bladensburg: first, a correction - Riversdale belonged to Charles Calvert, not Edward... the following, and the earlier post are from a book that I do not remember the name of, but copied the following: "J. Ninian Beall, in an article for the MD Hist. Magazine, claimed that Bladensburg..." ... was originally Bealltown, and that John Beall of Alexander [1688-1742] and his wife Verlinda Magruder [1690-1745] owned the tract called "Black Ash" or "Black Oak" long before it received the name of Bladensburg. As early as 1728 John Beall Sr was selling lots in the town, on the North Branch.. [of the Anacostia] and claims the General Assembly in 1742 set aside an area about 1/2 mile below "Beall Town" known as "Garrisons Landing" to be the new town called Bladensburgh. Originally Ninian owned the land on which Bladensburg stands, but when his dau. Rebecca m. Charles Calvert, Ninian Beall gave this land to them as a wedding gift. They called the area "Charles and Rebecca." At the time of the 1742 purchase, the tract belonged to Miss Elizabeth Calvert, whose family renamed the tract the Garrison - this Miss Calvert m. her cousin Benedict Calvert in 1748. 1750 she had 7800 acres, adding 7600 more in 1751. J. Ninian Beall owned extensive land near and around Bladensburg, but the town records never show his name. Nearby is the Bladensburg Dueling Grounds. In 1814 Edward Hopkins of MD d. here as a result of duelling, and nearly 50 other vengeful disagreements were settled, some agreeably and without bloodshed, others fatally. In 1819 Gen. Armistead questioned Col John M McCarty's right to vote in VA; the latter immediately challenged the former to a duel. The terms were muskets with buckshot at ten feet. Armistead d. instantly & McCarty recovered from a severe wrist wound, but never answered the psychological penalty of bitter penitance. The most notorious of those conflicts occurred in 1820 between notables of the US Navy - James Barron & Stephen Decatur, with Decatur being mortally wounded. found the name of the book- "Port of Bladensburg." This area also had been called "Scotland" at one time.