The Baker Family History
The Bakers of Highfields
The history and genealogy of the Baker family
Architects, Surgeons and Gentlemen
The home page of the Farndale family website of which this section is a part |
The Home page of the Baker family part of the website |
The Baker Family directory which is not yet compiled |
Notes on the Baker family history |
The Baker Family Tree, which is the best way to search the family history |
Welcome to the history of the Baker Family
Highfields in about 1900
Richard Baker
(1676 to 1749) William Baker of
Highfields (1705 to 1771) Richard Dod
Baker (1784 to 1807) William
Baker of Highfields (1787 to 1863)
Introduction to this
website The purpose of this web site is to make available genealogical and historical information about the Baker Family. This website is the
culmination of work started in the 1980s by Martin
Farndale (the son of Margaret
Louisa nee Baker, later Farndale), and continued by his son Richard
Farndale since 2023. Martin Farndale began researching the Farndale Family in 1956, but started to work on his mother’s families, the Bakers and the Halls in the 1980s. General
Sir Martin Farndale KCB died in May 2000. During his lifetime, he carried
out extensive research into the Farndale family history. He also undertook
work in the 1980s into the Baker family, from whom his mother was descended.
This part of the Farndale family website has been compiled by his son,
Richard Farndale and continues this research which is made available to
anyone who may be interested. Margaret Louisa
(“Peggy”) Baker (1901 to 1996) (BAK00002)
was the daughter of Arthur Baker (1860 to 1916)(BAK00155) and
the great great great granddaughter of William Baker (1705 to 1771)(BAK00068),
the Architect. She was the current website author’s granny. She married
Alfred Farndale (1897 to 1987)(FAR00683). She
taught physical education at Malvern Girl’s school and was one of the first
of her generation to buy a car. She developed a spirit of rebellion,
independence, and cheerfulness that was to characterise her life. She and
Alfred were pioneers in the prairies of Alberta and later settled in
Yorkshire and their large family, the
Wensleydale Line, still thrives. Peggy was proud of her Baker ancestry
and had many records and stories about the family. She enjoyed helping Martin
Farndale with his research into her family. |
The best way to view
this site Whilst you
can view this site on a mobile or tablet, it is primarily intended for use on
a PC. This is because the site is intended for the provision of detailed
information, more suited to the larger format of a PC. However, it does work
quite well on a tablet, such as an ipad. On an iphone it may sometimes tend
to be distorted with text not always aligning, though you can generally read
text and it should work ok with an iphone too. Your interest in the
site This site
is relevant to those whose name is Baker, or who know they are descended from
Bakers of Highfields. If this describes you, then you should be able to
discover a lot of information about your ancestors. If you have information
which you can share, please help me by getting in touch. If you have an interest
in Baker family history and particularly the information provided here: ·
First please tell your cousins and other relatives about the
site. ·
Second, please contact me by email to rcfarndale@hotmail.com. This will
encourage me to develop the research. It is
hoped that anyone able to provide more information about the Baker family
history, will e-mail Richard Farndale at rcfarndale@hotmail.com, so
that I can develop the available information and make corrections where you
can point those out to me. What you will find when
you explore this website This website
assists those who are a part of the wider Baker family, or otherwise linked
to it, to gain a greater understanding of their history and ancestral
origins. It provides vertical context to enable you to trace back your
ancestry through time directly. It provides horizontal context by providing
information about the wider family of which you are a part. Personal
Information
I do not wish to record
detailed information about living Bakers unless I know that you are happy for
me to do so. This site is about historic Bakers who are no longer alive. As a
rule I only record the most basic publicly available information about living
Bakers, primarily their month of birth. This is so that anyone who wishes,
can find themselves in the directory, and then use this site to explore their
ancestry. Where I am aware of
public information about living Bakers, on their own websites, or public
entries on the web which is available already, I have sometimes included that
information on personal pages of living Bakers. If you find your own
entry on this website and would like me to include more information about
you, please let me know. Please don’t provide me with any information you
would not wish to be publicly available.
Peggy Baker (later
Farndale) and the Baker family at Highfields in about 1990 |
|
A Simple Guide to using the website
The best way to explore the
Baker family history is to start with the Baker family tree. You
can then click on the links for individuals to find out more about particular
members of the wider family. There is also a timeline, which
provides a chronological history of the family. There is also a History of Highfields. |
Projected programme for this website
Having worked on the
material which Martin Farndale collected in the 1980s, and drawn the history
of the Bakers together with modern search methods, I have now reverted to
work on the Farndale family. I may do some more work
on the Baker family history in future, and will certainly do so as more
information is made available to me. |
Related Families Many other families will
be able to link to the Farndale Family Tree. There are more detailed
records of closely related families as follows: |
History of this website
Martin
Farndale’s historical research into the Farndales began: 1956
Martin Farndale’s
historical research into the Bakers began: 1980s
The Baker Family part of the Farndale website First Published by Richard Farndale: 1 October 2023
Peering back into our deep history:
The village in fact was like a deep-running cave
still linked to its antic past, a cave whose shadows were cluttered by spirits
and by laws still vaguely ancestral. This cave that we inhabited looked
backwards through chambers that led to our ghostly beginnings; and had not, as
yet, been tidied up, or scrubbed clean by electric light, or suburbanized by a
Victorian church, or papered by cinema screens. It was something we just had
time to inherit, to inherit and dimly know – the blood and beliefs of generations
who had been in this valley since the Stone Age. That continuous contact has at
last been broken, the deeper caves sealed off for ever. But arriving, as I did,
at the end of that age, I caught whiffs of something old as the glaciers. There
were ghosts in the stones, in the trees, and the walls, and each field and hill
had several. The elder people knew about these things and would refer to them
in personal terms, and there were certain landmarks about the valley –
tree-clumps, corners in woods – that bore separate, antique, half-muttered
names that were certainly older than Christian. The women in their talk still
used these names which are not used now any more. There was also a frank and
unfearful attitude to death, and an acceptance of violence as a kind of ritual
which no one accused or pardoned. In our grey stone village, especially in
winter, such stories never seemed strange. When I sat at home among my talking
sisters, or with an old woman sucking her jaws, and heard the long details of
hapless suicides, of fighting men loose in the snow, of witch-doomed widows
disembowelled by bulls, of childeating sows, and so on – I would look through
the windows and see the wet walls streaming, the black trees bend in the wind,
and I saw these things happening as natural convulsions of our landscape, and
though dry-mouthed, I was never astonished.
Cider with Rosie, by Laurie Lee, 1959