Roger's Reflections
A Brief Baird Family Background
The Bairds are very fortunate to have unusually good records of family history going back several generations. This brief sketch just touches on some of the highlights.
The ancestors of the Prairie Home Baird family lived in Scotland— reportedly in the Lanark area, which is about twenty-five miles southeast of Glasgow. To this day Baird is still the most prominent family name in Lanark; there are pages of Bairds in the local telephone directory. In the late 1700s some Baird families moved to Ireland; as I understand it they refused to give up their Presbyterian Church and join the Church of England as required by a new English law. After living a few years in the Londonderry area in northern Ireland, some of these Baird immigrated to America.
My great-great-grandfather, William Baird (1765-1863), came to America in 1794(?) at the age of nineteen and settled in central Pennsylvania. He became an American citizen in 1802 and married Nancy Harbison in 1805. They had nine children; four of these—Eliza, William, Robinson and John—moved to the Prairie Home community in central Illinois between 1859 and 1866.
In 1865, shortly before the end of the Civil War, my great-grandfather, John Baird (1809-1888) bought 320 acres of virgin prairie land that became the home and south farms. He had visited his brothers and sister on their recently-established farms in Prairie Home and was so impressed with the rich prairie farmland that he decided he would like to “come west” and settle near them. (However, before he made any final commitment he asked his wife, Hannah, to come out and see if she agreed; Hannah liked the prairie.) John was 55 when he moved to Prairie Home in 1866 with his wife and three daughters, Henrietta 13, Ella 10 and Nancy 8. They lived in a small house a couple of miles from the farm until the Baird farmhouse was completed in 1868.
Several years later in 1875 my grandfather, John Harris Baird (1854-1917) -- he was John Baird’s nephew, son of John’s brother Samuel—moved from Pennsylvania to Prairie Home to farm land his father had bought. John Harris, a warm and outgoing young man was a frequent visitor and soon became a favorite of the Baird daughters. In 1883 John Harris and Henrietta (1853-1916), my grandmother, were married and settled down on his father’s nearby farm. Two years later a son, DeForest (1885-1957), my father, was born. At the death of John Harris in 1888 the young family moved to the home farm, which Henrietta had inherited. My father lived there for the rest of his life—almost seventy years.
In 1881 my maternal grandfather, John Garman (1853-1921), bought the 160 acre farm just north of the Baird farm. He married Winnie Tolly and, after her untimely death, married Sarah Frances Foster (1855-1926), my maternal grandmother. There were four children—Emma, Mary, Grace and Walter. Grace Garman (1891-1988) was my mother. The Baird and Garman families were good friends as well as neighbors. The children attended East Center school together.
My parents, DeForest Baird and Grace Garman were married in April of 1916 and took over operation of the Baird farm. (Grandmother Henrietta had died earlier that year; Grandfather John Harris and Dad’s sister Mary had moved to a house in Bethany. John Harris died the following winter.) My parents had six children, although Junior died in infancy:
Donald (1917-2000)
John (1918-
DeForest Jr. (1921-1921)
Roger (1923-
Paul (1926-1983)
Mary Grace (1931-
As I am writing this very short history of the Baird family, I find a fact about the family chronology rather interesting: the period in which we Baird children were growing up—the 1930s—was the halfway point between the time John Baird brought his family to Prairie Home (1866) and the present (2003). In other words, on a time scale we were then just as close to those pioneer days on the open prairie of the 1860s as we were to these “modern” days of the twenty first century. The midpoint was about 1934.
Since essentially all of these pages are about events in the 1930s, a listing of our ages in January of 1934 might help give some perspective: Dad 48, Mother 42, Donald 16, John 15, Roger 10, Paul 8, and Mary Grace 3.