Baker's Hollow or LeBaker's Hollow ?

     On my first trip to Indiana, with Bruce (my at that time husband) he told me about how his family was from an area just outside of Columbus called Baker’s Hollow.  There seemed to be a lot of the family from that are; kids were born there, went to school close by, ran their family business there, and the list goes on.  The history with the Baker family goes deep there and I am hoping to get some good stories from people who actually grew up there or spent a good amount of time there. 

     I’ll skip around a little here and let you know what I found when doing the research on the Baker family.  I started with Martha Frances, my children’s grandmother, who they unfortunately never got to meet, and headed back.  To date I have only reached 1275, the year that Robert LeBaker was born in Kent, England.  I have yet to find his wife but he had a son named Sir Thomas LeBaker who was born in 1300, in Durham, England.  Sir Thomas married Thomasine Andrew from Elham, England, and from there I need to do more research to find what kind of family they had.  For sure, they had two sons; the first named John and Thomas.  Thomas is our connection to the Bakers of Baker’s Hollow.  So – there follows 3 more Thomas’, of which the first one dropped the Le part of LeBaker, and 2 Johns, a Christopher, a Sir George and then an Andrew, born in 1604 .  All of these men were born in England but Andrew ventured out to the New World 

and started a life in Massachusetts.  At this point I have found records showing that he had two sons with is wife, Frances Briggs.  The first was Samuel, who was born 1629, in England.  The second was John, born in 1630, in Massachusetts.  We can only assume that if the records are correct, Andrew and Frances arrived between the birth of these two boys. 

 

     These facts can get pretty boring after a bit, unless you are the one playing detective and tracking down all the leads and reading the stories that lead you to the next generations. I can see how this research can take a life time.  At this point, I will spend as much time as possible over the next couple months to get the tree filled.

 I am a bit curious about something -

Why did LeBaker change to Baker?  I have read many stories about how the children’s names where chosen and why some did change their last names.  I just wonder about the LeBaker’s in particular. I'll keep looking for a story about that.

And I do wonder what it would have been like if that little community in Indiana, just outside of Columbus, would have been called LeBaker’s Hollow.  Just doesn't sound right to me.