David Baker was born on 15 May 1775 in the Beekman Patent. Gideon Baker, his father, is discussed in Part II of the Baker Ancestry. We know little about David but can readily guess that his childhood was not placid and stable. To begin with he was born less than a month after Paul Revere's ride (18 April 1775). He had four older brothers, the eldest of whom was only eight years old when David was born. When David was five years old his father spent some weeks in "gaol" on charges of spying for the British. Solomon Baker, his father's cousin was hanged, and there must have been great family anxiety regarding Gideon and others. Then, sometime before 1783, David's mother died. By 1783 his father had remarried (unknown date) and had a child with his second wife, so it is certain that David was motherless at around the same time that his father was in jail.
It is worth noting that although Gideon Baker moved some part of his family to Vermont about 1782, his son David must have returned to New York as a young man where he settled and lived in Peru, Clinton County. In 1797 when David was 22, he married Mary White. Mary had four children and died at the age of 29, twelve days aftet the birth of the fourth. Two years later, when he was 31, David married again, this time to Lydia Agard. Lydia was 19 years old when she married and 30 years old when she died two weeks after the birth of her fifth child. David married a third time to Hannah Brownell and had two more children for a total of eleven children by three wives. David died himself in 1847. His last son, William Baker was killed in the Civil War. The son through whom our line descends will be treated in the next post.
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