English: occupational name, from Middle English bakere, Old English b�cere, 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 of cognates or equivalents in many other languages, for example German B�cker, Becker; Dutch Bakker, Bakmann; French Boulanger. For other forms see Hanks and Hodges (1988).

Miller

English and Scottish: occupational name for a miller. The standard modern vocabulary word represents the northern Middle English term, an agent derivative of mille �mill�, reinforced by Old Norse mylnari (see Milner). In southern, western, and central England Millward (literally, �mill keeper�) was the usual term. The American surname has absorbed many cognate surnames from other European languages, for example French Meunier, Dumoulin, Demoulins, and Moulin; German Mueller; Dutch Molenaar; Italian Molinaro; Spanish Molinero; Hungarian Moln�r; Slavic Mlinar, etc.
Southwestern and Swiss German and Jewish (Ashkenazic): variant of M�ller.

Dictionary of American Family Names, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-508137-4

Top Places of Origin for Baker

Compiled by Ancestry.com from the New York Passenger Lists

Ports of Departure for Baker

Port	Baker Immigrants
Liverpool, England and Queenstown, Ireland	1833
Liverpool, England	1290
Aspinwall, Panama	471
London, England	404
Antwerp, Belgium	130
Le Havre, France	116

Compiled by Ancestry.com from the New York Passenger Lists

Top Occupations for Baker in 1880
Compiled by Ancestry.com for head of households from the 1880 US Federal Census records

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