Elizabeth (Baker) Hopkins

Ancestors

Daughter of Thomas Rice Baker and Amy Rachel (Bingham) Baker

Descendants

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Biography

Elizabeth was born on 4 Oct 1919 in Garrard County, Kentucky, the daughter of Thomas Rice Baker and Amy Bingham.

In 1929, typhoid fever raged through Kentucky, killing her father, two sisters, and a brother-in-law. Elizabeth, known as Lizzy as a child, also contracted typhoid fever but recovered after a rough year in which she struggled to walk even with homemade crutches.

The surviving family members were then slammed by the economic hardships of not having an income earner as well as the onslaught of the Great Depression.

In a genealogical video featuring Elizabeth, conducted by her eldest grandchild Kenneth W Williams, and which can be found on YouTube, she said that her mother encouraged her and her sister Martha to marry young in an attempt to escape poverty. And Elizabeth said she was lucky to meet Alfred Shelby Hopkins.

"He was good-looking, and I fell in love with him," Elizabeth said in the video interview. It would be a lifelong love affair.

She married Alfred Shelby Hopkins on 17 Oct 1932 in Kentucky. They had three of their five children in Kentucky, and then they moved to Cincinnati Ohio on 1 Jan 1937 just in time for the Great Flood of 1937. Their two youngest children were born in Ohio.

The five children were extremely close to their parents.

She was widowed in 1974, when Alfred died suddenly of a massive coronary event.

Elizabeth would then begin spending her winters in Florida either with her sister Martha or with her family.

She passed away on 7 Jul 2008 at a hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Sources

• FamilySearch

"Kentucky, Vital Record Indexes, 1911-1999," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QKHV-173Z : 11 February 2018), Lizzie Baker, 04 Oct 1919; citing Birth, Garrard, Kentucky, United States, Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, Frankfort.

View a genealogical documentary on Elizabeth (Baker) Hopkins at YouTube

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Sources

1. ↑
   • Kenneth Williams Family Tree: My maternal grandmother
   • Kentucky Birth Index
   • Ohio Death Records
   • Obituary

• Paternal and maternal relationships to Thomas Rice Baker and Amy Rachel Bingham are confirmed by a GEDmatch test match between Kenneth Williams GEDmatch CH2415663 and his maternal 1C1X Brenda Saylor Harasewicz GEDmatch ZU8762945.Estimated number of generations to MRCA = 2.7, based on sharing 320.2 cM across 18 total half-match segments.

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