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Millard P. Bell was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to John and Margaret Bell on 12 December 1814. As a youth, his family moved to eastern New York, where he met and married Margaret Powers. He undoubtedly worked along the Lake Champlain waterway in the burgeoning lumber industry there. In the late 1830s, after the opening of the Erie Canal, Millard moved with his wife and daughter to eastern Ohio, settling in Milo, where he worked as a woodcutter. Early in the 1840s he moved west across the state to Defiance, Ohio, where he fathered four additional children. Sometime in the late 1850s, he suffered losses from several lawsuits. He abandoned his family, left home and headed further west, eventually arriving in Salt Lake City. Here, on 27 August 1859, Millard P. Bell was baptized into the Mormon faith.
Thomas Husbands had moved from his rural home in the village of Bishop's Frome, Hereford County, England, to London to obtain work in one of the breweries there. In London, he met and married Margaret Maria Weaight and they raised a family of seven children. Their second daughter, Harriet, was born in London on 15 February 1832. Thomas was killed in an accident at the brewery on 13 May 1857. His widow, who had been converted to the Mormon faith, decided to leave England for America. They travelled on the clipper ship Underwriter, which arrived in New York on 1 May 1860. They then travelled to the Mormon camp at Florence, Nebraska, (on the site previously known as Winter Quarters), followed by an additional eleven weeks crossing the plains to Salt Lake City, arriving there on 30 September 1860.
Ten weeks after her arrival in Salt Lake, the 28-year-old Harriet Husbands and the 45-year-old Millard Bell were married. Six children were born to this marriage, three of whom survived to adulthood. Millard operated a lumber yard in Salt Lake City. There is an old family story that at some point it suffered a devastating fire. Eight years after their marriage, Millard Bell died of "apoplexy" (a stroke) on 18 August 1868. Following her husband's death, Harriet married into the polygamous family of Collins Eastman Flanders, on 29 September 1871. She was the fifth of his five wives and bore him three children. Harriet Bell (she retained the Bell surname) died of paralysis and myelitis (an inflamation of bone marrow) on 28 August 1899. She is also buried in the Salt Lake City cemetery.