G. Carson Baker's Cunningham Catalog — The Baker Family
The Bakers
Robert Baker 1800–1880
Charles Baker 1853–1932
G. Carson Baker 1881–1950
Margaret Baker 1907–1993
Dorothy Baker 1911–1997
Our family's oral and personally documented history of the Bakers goes back only to G. Carson Baker's father, Charles Baker, born in 1853. We have no family records of Charles's parents, no family knowledge or stories of Robert Baker, and we didn't set out to look for them. But Charles was a mystery man, and we hoped to find answers to a few big questions about him: 1) When did he come over from Ireland? 2) When did he start working for Cunningham? 3) How did he meet and marry a girl from Clyde N.Y., a tiny rural town, 45 miles away from Rochester?
Short answers to 1 and 2: Charles did not immigrate from Ireland; his parents did. He appears to have started at Cunningham as a carriage painter as early as age 16 in 1870. We have not yet found an answer to 3.
Because we didn't know who Charles's parents were, nor if he had brothers or sisters, he was like an "only ancestor," all on his own as a single root in our family tree. A twist of research and review of many public records reveals a plausible picture that the father of our Charles is Robert Baker. Fitting together puzzles pieces of information, we can see Charles was not alone at all, and actually quite the opposite. If Robert is the father of our Charles, then all the people in his family are now our family, too!
