Ida Rebecca Burr was born on November 17, 1870, near Worcester, Massachusetts, to Frederick and Adelaide Burr. Her father was a farmer who owned $1,900 of real estate and $900 of personal property by 1870. The family moved to Bennington, Kansas, in the 1870s. By the early 1890s, she was studying music in college, and a local writer declared her “a most promising musician as well as an estimable young lady.”
She married Olin Bell on May 27, 1891, and they had at least two children: Grace, born around 1895; and Dorothy, born around 1898. They lived in Lawrence, Kansas, and her husband worked as a merchant. By 1910, she was helping to care for her aging father. They moved to Muncie, Indiana, in the 1910s. In 1926, she began teaching piano at Ball State College. She died of chronic myocarditis in Muncie on December 11, 1935.