Baker Peters Family Tree
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Our Family Tree - clickable image map
dot The seed dot diagram dot
It sprouted, so molecular paleontologists tell us, in east Africa, a few hundred thousand years ago. The human genome blossomed, bore fruit, and scattered its seed across six continents. Our descendants will probably plant it on Antarctica, the moon, and maybe under the sea. And all that great forest of humanity, past and yet to come, is our Family. The DNA of every human being, including ourselves, can be found in the fossils of those first, enterprising hominids.
 
So you can see why undertaking the charting of a family tree might be a daunting task.		 dot
photo dot Growth The "double helix" of DNA
When timber matures, it can be felled, milled and pulped. Our most recent ancestors, at least, have left us a paper trail through the forest. This is where paleontology ends and historical genealogy begins. Documents such as deeds, military records, birth certificates and letters can lead us to our roots, as can photographs and epitaphs. Now, with the growth of the World Wide Web, the information retrieved from these records is shared by genealogists and family historians around the world. As a result, many people have been reunited with long-lost relatives, discovered cousins whose existence they never suspected, and reclaimed the treasures of heritage.
 
The Human Family's tree is being shaken.
Ault Kirk Cemetery, Alloway, Scotland dot Life-cycles
Beginnings are endings and endings are beginnings. In terms of history and biology, that means we experience things in cycles. In terms of genealogy, it means we work backwards. Starting with living memory and our own filing cabinets and photo albums, we move through the recent past until we encounter questions whose answers aren't to be found in our attics. Our job then is to find out where our ancestors filed, mislaid, discarded, or hid them, or whom they were stolen by or given to. Sometimes the answers we seek were simply forgotten by the last person who possessed them, or they were kept secret until she or he died. Or the information was carefully recorded on media that decomposed or in a language now lost to us. Many more lifetimes have slipped through the cracks of history than we've managed to preserve.
 
What will we pass on to future generations?
Fossils
This website catalogues, in part, a collection of documents, photos and manuscripts left to us by our ancestors. Taken together, they tell us quite a bit about who we are.
So, who are we? photo of church and congregation
Each of us is an individual, of course. But as a family, we have an identity too. On the Peters/Zacharias side, that identity was formed within a tightly knit community, the Mennonite Church. Our Mennonite ancestors were pacifists and farmers. They valued practical education more than impressive degrees, devout faith and practice more than lofty cathedrals. Many of them were musicians. Some were business owners. All were pioneers. And among them were a few pioneers of spirit as well. Both the Peters and Zacharias families broke with centuries-old tradition to follow the teachings of Emmanuel Swedenborg, founder of the New Church. dot
dot New Church in Herbert, Saskatchewan
baseball team photo dot Faith was important to many of our ancestors on the Baker/Black side, too. Those I know most about are the Rice family, who were prominent figures in several local histories. Their maternal forbears carried the family names Looney, Swearingen, Marble, and possibly Tackett, among others. Some were landowners and farmers or ranchers. There were soldiers, deacons, ivy leaguers, drunks, huguenots, civic leaders, and many, many mothers of large, healthy families. As for the others, the Ruels, the Bakers and the Blacks, I just don't know much. Except that, somewhere along the line, we got baseball in our blood.
Henry Carroll Baker, standing row, fourth from left dot
Where did we come from?
We are the descendants of Europeans who emigrated to the New World over a period of some 250 years. On the Baker side, oral tradition has it that we are English, Welsh, French and Scotch-Irish. The earliest English arrivals that I know of crossed the Atlantic in 1638, landing in Massachusetts. On the Peters side, in search of religious freedom, our Mennonite forebears came from Holland and Germany via Russia, to settle at last in Canada. dot map
painting of Wm. the Conquerer dot Are we related to this man?
Well, maybe. (Either that, or we're related to someone gullible or devious who once paid a genealogist to "discover" royalty in our lineage.) This is William the Conqueror, also known as William the Bastard. The Norman invader was the progenitor of a line of English kings, whose blue blood was passed on through generations of Dukes of Norfolk. One of these dukes had a daughter who married into the line from which our ancestor Deacon Edmund Rice may have descended. So far as I've been able to discover, there is no direct evidence to support the claim. We have to be careful and thorough when we research our roots, or we may find ourselves barking up the wrong tree.
Click on the links below to explore our family tree.
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Ancestors of Henry A. Baker Our Closest Kin Ancestors of Ella Peters Baker
     
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