Secret Santa Wish 139 Research

Date: [unknown] [unknown]
Location: Lancashire, England, United Kingdom

Contents 1 The Request 2 Marriage 3 Back to the start 4 Side trip into Edith's family 5 Back to Phyllis's family 6 Back to what we know about William 7 William Henry Baker (Senior?) 8 Conclusion

The Request

My ask is if anyone can help me with a mystery family member on my Mum’s side, William Henry Baker; all I have is a marriage, and his history otherwise is a mystery… without more info I have this big gap in my family tree. Thanks in advance if anyone can help! I’m told German records can be very hard to find / are non-existant.

Marriage

I absolutely could not find anything but the marriage registration on line. We checked the free transcription sites as well as the paid, but no luck anywhere. It's possible that they had a civil wedding, so there are no useful marriage records to find, but it's also possible it's just too recent to show up.

Back to the start

Since there's nothing marriage related available, there's two other avenues to take: Phyllis's family, and making sure there's no other relevant records floating around.

Given the birth registration, I checked to see if there were siblings with the same family members, and found a birth registration for an Edith P with the same mother's maiden name. https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QV73-6Y7G

They aren't on the GRO, so it's not possible to order the birth certificates from them, but the Lancashire BMD had a slightly different bit of information: BAKER Edith Phyllis 1945 Walton Park Liverpool WPARK/58/16

So it seems pretty likely that this is Irene's older sister. (I'm guessing the M in Irene's name is May, her mother's middle name?) It may be possible to get this birth certificate. The site just isn't loading properly for me right now.

Side trip into Edith's family

Per https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QV6M-57ZY she married Ronald Kennett in 1965. It seems possible they had two girls, Carol (1965) and Sandra (1972), see attached screenshot from the BMD.

I see no records to suggest Edith or Ronald are dead.

Back to Phyllis's family

There's a lot of healthy family trees for her family out there, and it intrigued me that her father was born in Germany. I will have the family built out a little more on that side, as there are good records for all of her siblings.

Sadly no one else married a Baker.

Back to what we know about William

Phyllis was definitely born in 1909, and given general trends in marriage it seemed unlikely (though not impossible) that William was 11 years younger than her. There also wasn't any way to tell for sure if he was or wasn't born in Germany, but the fact that Phyllis's dad was made me wonder if the family story had just gotten a bit confused over time, so I decided to start basically from scratch.

There are a fair number of Winter family trees with William on them, a lot of which pointed to the same date range and place:

BIRTH 24 AUG 1902 • Liverpool, Lancashire, England DEATH DEC 1978 • Knowsley, Merseyside, England.

That pulls up a specific death certificate: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QVZQ-4VP2

and a 1939 register with a family group--William, two siblings, and his widowed mother. Who happens to have the same name as William's oldest daughter.

William Henry Baker (Senior?)

William Henry Baker (1867-) had 5 kids. He and his wife, Edith Kate (Waddington) Baker (1867-1953) were married in the same church that Phyllis's parents married in. Looking at the addresses on 1911 census, Phyllis and William's families were a half mile away. In 1939 the families were about 6 miles away, still a very reasonable distance.

Conclusion

I think there's a very strong chance that this is William Henry Baker's family.