When Joan Marie Baker was born in 1931, in Detroit, Wayne, Michigan, United States, her father, Albert Bruce Baker, was 47 and her mother, Victoria Maria Boulanger, was 36. She had at least 1 son and 1 daughter with Thomas Joseph McDonald. She died on 26 January 1991, in Bloomfield Hills, Oakland, Michigan, United States, at the age of 60, and was buried in Southfield, Oakland, Michigan, United States.
English: occupational name, from Middle English bakere, Old English bæcere, a derivative of bacan ‘to bake’. It may have been used for someone whose special task in the kitchen of a great house or castle was the baking of bread, but since most humbler households did their own baking in the Middle Ages, it may also have referred to the owner of a communal oven used by the whole village. The right to be in charge of this and exact money or loaves in return for its use was in many parts of the country a hereditary feudal privilege. Compare Miller . Less often the surname may have been acquired by someone noted for baking particularly fine bread or by a baker of pottery or bricks.
Americanized form (translation into English) of surnames meaning ‘baker’, for example Dutch Bakker , German Becker and Beck , French Boulanger and Bélanger (see Belanger ), Czech Pekař, Slovak Pekár, and Croatian Pekar .
History: Baker was established as an early immigrant surname in Puritan New England. Among others, two men called Remember Baker (father and son) lived at Woodbury, CT, in the early 17th century, and an Alexander Baker arrived in Boston, MA, in 1635.
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