Elmira Victoria Evans Baker was born in New York on the 29th of July 1897 to parents, Henry Courtland Evans and Mary Emily Battersby Evans. Henry and Mary married in Philladelphia and Elmira was their only child. Mary Evans died in 1900 when just thirty two and is buried in Cedar Hall Cemetery in Philadelphia beside her parents and siblings.
After the death of her mother, Elmira relocated to Maryland's Eastern Shore where she had relatives, while her father remained in New York. The 1910 U.S. Census shows Elmira relocated yet again and living in Vernon, Oneida, New York where she is a student.
Elmira was a registered nurse who received her training at the New Jersey State Hospital at Greystone Park, an imposing brick structure built in 1876 and utilized as the state phychiatric hospital. Dr. Britton Evans, an uncle, was Medical Director of Greystone at that time. This is where Elmira was living and working when she met and married Dr. Maclyn "Max" F. Baker in August of 1920.
The Baker's had two children together: Evan Hubert, born in 1926, and Donald "Donn" born in 1928. The family lived in Irvington, New Jersey and Max was working as a medical practitioner, while Elmira was a homemaker.
The Baker's divorced sometime in the late 1930's and Elmira returned to her nursing career. In 1964, she earned a Bachelorette in nursing from New York University School of Nursing while also working as an instructor at the Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey.
According to an obituary published by the Asbury Park Press, Elmira Baker worked in the field of nursing until five years prior to her death at the age of eighty eight. She was passionate about elevating the standards of the nursing profession, active in her community and frequently submitted letters to the editorial page of her local newspaper.
In 2002, Evan H. Baker, died in Steamboat Springs, Colorado at the age of seventy six, and younger sibling, Donn Baker, died in Red Bank, New Jersey, in 2013, at the age of eighty five. Both left behind children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Dr. Maclyn Baker, who had remarried, died in Florida in 1985.
Elmira Victoria Evans Baker died at the King James Nursing Home in Middleton, New Jersey on the 29th of September 1985 and was buried on Hart Island on the 5th of March 1987.
