Thanks for your interest in my ancestor!
I revisit the story of this Thomas Baxter from time to time. I don't really have any strong memories of anything about this Alice. There may have been some speculation on that, with Thomas having a daughter by that name. There may also have been an Alice Baxter who might reasonably have been suspected of being his mother. So at least there's a decent chance that she MIGHT be a real person, and in the right place on the tree.
It seems like there are bigger problems with the profile, though. For a start, it's stated as a fact that George Baxter was his brother, based on a single (unnamed, I think) source that you probably wouldn't even dignify as a "secondary source". It was a simple statement is some history book that was NOT about their genealogy, and gave no proof whatsoever. In reality, it seems to be missed that while Thomas was born around 1626, it's believed that George immigrated to America in the mid 1630s - when Thomas was a child! It seems that George was an adult, and Thomas was a child then, so the more likely explanation is that they were father and son. They appear in the same places at the same time, and were the only Baxters there. How do we imagine Thomas GOT to America, at an early age? I have heard nothing of George's family - i.e., who is children might have been.
Then there's this outrageous "Behind Every Great Fortune There Is A Crime" stuff. Beside such an opinion having no place on a WikiTree profile, Thomas' divorce was because of abandonment, and his property in New Amsterdam had been seized. The idea that his descendants (raised by the wife he deserted, without him) prospered from inheriting his supposedly vast ill-gotten gains is completely absurd.
As far as his "absurd amounts of plundering", I have found record of his seizing exactly TWO vessels - ever - besides the fact that New Amsterdam was a primitive outpost with little in the way of riches to actually plunder. He seized thse two ships as a privateer, and as best I can tell the reason he got labelled a "pirate" was either because the second ship belonged to somebody who was well-connected with the people who commissioned him, or because his sponsors didn't get their cut. The term "pirate" implies a seafaring bandit who simply plundered for personal gain. Thomas clearly acted out of revenge (for having been expelled for being an Englishman, and also having his property stolen), and his English patriotism. Once England ultimately gained control of New Amsterdam - with his help - he received nothing whatsoever from them for his efforts. There is nothing about him plundering anything after hostilities ceased.
All I can figure as far as this characterization of him as a "comical and larger than life Rake" is that Miss Frances Baxter (in her genealogy) - who clearly struggles with the issue of the progenitor of her honorable family being termed a "pirate" in the history books - says on the top of page 6 "So we may consider him as a sort of comic opera pirate."
That doesn't even mean he was "comical" - it means he was not (supposedly) physically threatening. In reality, another account I ran across gave a quite different (and probably more realistic) impression - that of a somewhat surly man that you did not want to mess with, for fear of physical injury.
Finally, I've seen a "notable" designation on some profiles. Might that apply? This Thomas was a significant figure in the early history of New York (when it was New Amsterdam, of course), both for his construction of the Wall of Wall St, and for his status as privateer and/or pirate. One web search I did on him once turned up an article that actually blamed him for all the piracy that ever happened on the Atlantic coast of the Americas, because he was supposedly first (as though nobody else would have thought of doing that on their own afterwards). So - at least according to THAT author - he was the "first pirate". On top of all that, a book came out some years ago about "the first divorce in America", and Thomas' divorce was earlier than the one that was written about, so it's possible that Thomas' was actually the first divorce in America, as well.
