Bernice Baker was born in Nov 1892 in Luverne, Rock, Minnesota. She was the second child of William H Baker and Lauretta Fisher Baker.  Five of Helen's six siblings were also born in Minnesota: Iza in 1890, Lettie in 1893, Bernard in 1895, Helen in 1897 and Jay in 1902. One of her sisters, Lettie, died as an infant while the family was in Minnesota.  Helen's sister Thelma was born in 1906 after the family moved to Washington in 1904 or 1905.

Helen's parents divorced after they moved to Washington and in 1911 her mother married William J Lawton. Lauretta and William left Olympia in 1915 and moved to Montana to homestead on Horse Creek in Treasure County, Montana. Lauretta's two sons, Bernard and Jay, went with them.  By that time Helen's older sister, Iza,  had married Jacob Frisch and was settled with two children in Olympia. Nine year old Thelma stayed behind with Iza rather than be uprooted from her school and friends to face the hardship of homesteading in Montana. Seventeen year old Helen had married a twenty-five year old furniture salesman, Carl Nommensen, and also seemed settled in Olympia. Bernice was twenty three in 1915 and a popular young woman. She had no desire to leave Olympia and its social scene to go homestead in rural Montana. Instead she left for California to marry Arthur Barnes. Arthur and his brother, George Barnes, owned the Barnes Music Company in Los Angles. Arthur worked as a salesman in the Los Angles store until he became the manager for the store in Olympia in 1906 where he met Bernice. Arthur had to return to Los Angeles for business so Beatrice took matters into her own hands and went down to Los Angeles to "claim" him. They were married on 22 Dec 1915.

Bernice definitely had a flair for the dramatic. A  Dec 30, 1915 newspaper article from The Los Angeles Herald (see below) gives her breathless story on how she came to Los Angeles to claim her true love for Leap Year. When Arthur and Bernice were divorced on 10 April, 1923 on charges he deserted her, the Los Angeles Times article below gave her sad account of the proceedings. She related how Arthur had refused to take her back after she went on a visit to relatives. She claimed she had no thought of an acting career but Arthur had insisted she train for the stage which she said she did with some success. She then claimed he grew cold toward her and rebuffed her attempts at reconciliation. Photos of a beautiful Bernice accompanied both articles and the fact that she was an aspiring actress made for good publicity. Bernice may have inherited her dramatic tendencies. Her aunt, Clara B. Baker, was an actress on the New York stage and by all accounts led an exciting life off stage as well. She was married twice, her first husband was in show business also (sounds like he was a stage show producer) and he died in a fire. She remarried but never had any children

In the 1920 census Arthur and Bernice are living in Los Angeles where he is selling pianos at the Barnes Music Company. When they were divorced in 1923 Bernice received a property settlement of $125 a month and a piano and a phonograph, both of which were definitely valuable items at the time. In the 1930 census Bernice is living as a lodger in Calabasas, California and working as a private nurse for a divorced magazine author, Mr. Alaise D Reith (sp?). What her role and relationship with Mr. Reith actually were is not known but somehow it is hard to visualize Bernice as someone's nurse!

In 1931 Bernice started getting ill from the TB she had contracted as a child. Finally the family had to scrape the money together to get her admitted to the  Montana State Tuberculosis Sanitarium in Deer Lodge, Montana near Galen. Bernice died there on 19 Oct 1935 at age 42 and was buried in Odd Fellows Memorial Park and Mausoleum In Tumwater, Thurston, Washington.