The Baker family of the Isle of Wight, Wellow and Portsmouth
Chale church, Isle of Wight, where George Baker married Grace Perry in 1779
The connection
Will is descended from the Bakers via George, who married on the Isle of Wight in 1755, his son George b1755, his son George b1780 and his daughter Mary Ann (1805-94) who marries into the Prossor family. Mary Ann’s son Henry Prossor (1841-1928) is Will’s paternal great grandfather.
The name
Charles Manners and Alice Barnett in Iolanthe in 1892; He is a distant cousin several times removed. Manners is also known as the "father of English opera”.
The Quebec Hotel in Portsmouth, also known as the “house at the point” painted by Edward W Cooke RA. The Baker family business had the warehouse on the left.
“Lane View at Isaac Baker’s, thunderstorm creeping up.” Isaac was the brother of 3 x gt grandfather George Baker. The picture shows Hatches Farm, Fox’s Lane, West Wellow.
Mary Baker, 2 x gt grandmother. She was born in 1805 and saw Portsmouth when it was the chief port for Britain’s "woodenwall” battleships. She married Anthony Prossor.
Odds and ends
• In Binstead on March 6 1796, the Bakers baptised four children on the same day – Thomas, William, Isaac and Harriet. This followed the repeal of the thre'penny tax on baptisms; the previous family baptism had been Hannah in 1787.
• Many of my Baker family members are buried in Wellow churchyard, about 11 miles NW of Southampton
• George Baker b1755 left daughter Ann out of his will ‘because she had been well provided for by her uncle William Hinton of Marvell’. Ann’s fortune later led to a series of court cases.
• Ann’s son, William Hinton Campbell, studied architecture. He won the Royal Academy gold medal in 1841. He drowned in Perth, Australia, in 1855
Highlights
The Bakers were a family of yeoman farmers, making their living from husbandry.
We have traced them back to George and Sarah Baker, who married in Brixton (Brightstone), Isle of Wight, in 1755.
Their son George b1755 married Grace Perry b1760 in Chale in 1779. In the 1780s the family moved across the Isle of Wight to Binstead, possibly to look after a dying maternal uncle. They later settled in Wellow on the Hampshire/Wiltshire border.
George Baker 1780 moved from Wellow to Portsea and set up a grocery business at 28 Queen Street, specialising in Irish produce, including cheese, but also importing fruit from Spain and Africa.
George b1807, the brother of Will’s ancestor Mary Ann b1805, was the owner of Portsmouth’s The House at the Point in the 1850s when EW Cooke RA painted it as The Quebec Hotel.
Read the detail
Want to know more about the Bakers and associated families? We’ve put together these notes
Mary Baker married Anthony Prossor in St Mary’s church, Portsmouth, in 1827. The current church was built in the early 1840s
Inside St Mary’s church as Mary Baker would have known it
Thomas Rowlandson’s etching of Portsmouth Point, also known as Spice Island, captures the character of the town in George and Mary Baker’s day
This picture of the yacht Windhover is in our collection of family snaps. She was built in Weymouth in 1848 and is one of the first racing yachts