Amanda Louise Baines Knight

Black female, born 15 May 1912 in Pensacola, Florida. She first appeared in my research as the mother of an infant boy stillborn in 1932.

Louise appeared in the 1930 census as a 16-year-old in the household of Jim Williams (who may or may not have been her father) and her mother, Rosa M. Williams. She is enumerated as Louisa Williams, born in Florida. I cannot find that she ever used the name “Williams” anywhere else.

She did not appear in many of the  extant Pensacola City Directories; she appeared in the 1934, 1948, and 1955 directories. In each, she was identified with a (c) for Colored and she was working as a maid. The 1955 directory gives the detail that she was employed by Bon Marche (a local department store). She lived at 110 E. Bobe Street, which was her mother’s home before Rosa remarried and moved. That was also the address identified as her residence in her child’s death certificate.

Louise appeared in the 1963 obituary of her mother, Rosa Williams Jones, as Louise B. Knight, though in a later legal notice to creditors of her mother’s estate, she appeared as Louise Baines. She appeared as a survivor of her stepfather, George E. Jones, in his 1967 obituary as Louise Baines. From 1993 to 1995 she was listed in Pensacola phone directory under Louise B. Knight, living at 110 E. Bobe St.

Amanda Louise Knight died 15 May 1994 at the age of 82. Her obituary states that she retired from Pensacola Naval Air Station 20 years earlier, and that she was a member of Allen Chapel A.M.E. Church. Survivors included her daughter, Patsy Hale; her son-in-law, Miller Hall; brothers William, Clemons, and Ross Baines; and stepsisters Doris Baines, Clare Baines, Rosaline Baines Hayes and Grace Baynes Purifoy.

In 1999 a legal notice appeared in the Pensacola News Journal (directed at the Estate of Louise Baines and one C.G. Jackson who appears to have been a developer) that the property at 110 E. Bobe Street had been declared unsafe and was to be demolished.

Researching Clemon, William, and Ross Baines produced the majority of the family tree presently on Ancestry. The father of all the children is Sinnie Bayne, though all the siblings mentioned in the obituary appear to be half-siblings, the children of Sinnie’s second wife, Ressie Patton. Sinnie was married to a woman named Mary (“Minnie”) in the 1920 census and the 1921 Pensacola City Directory. After that, Mary disappears. If the 1918 marriage of Sonnie Baynes to Mary J. Barge in Escambia County is the same couple, Mary was linked to Sinnie too late to be Louise’s mother. Just to confuse matters, Sinnie and Mary appear to have had a child named Lucille, and there is a granddaughter named Louise in the household of Teller Bayne (Sinnie’s father), though the parent is not identified. Both of these girls are too young to be Amanda Louise as they were both born around 1920.

110 E. Bobe St. is the binding element between Louise and this family, as Clemon was an Executor of Louise’s estate and Grace Purifoy signed over the property – both appear in legal documents around the condemnation and demolition of the house.

My present suspicion is that Rosa was a poorly documented first wife (or undocumented consort) of Sinnie Bayne, who was the father of Amanda Louise Baines. He was in Pensacola beginning in 1910 (single, boarder) and Rosa is unaccounted for back then. Research continues.

FAMILY:

Mother: Rosa M. Williams Jones

Children: Unnamed Son, Patsy Hale

SOURCES:

Florida Certificate of Death, Florida Deaths, 1877-1939. Database. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org : 14 June 2016. Index based upon data collected by the Genealogical Society of Utah, Salt Lake City.

Ancestry.com. U.S., City Directories, 1822-1995 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011.