Born in Principality of Transylvania (then part of the Austrian Empire), she became an orphan when her parents and brother were murdered by the Romanian marauders led by Ioan Axente Sever and Simion Prodan who killed approximately 1000 predominantly Hungarian civilians in Straßburg am Mieresch on 8–9 January, 1849.

While Baker was visiting the Duke of Atholl on his shooting estate in Scotland, he befriended Maharaja Duleep Singh and in 1858–1859, the two partnered an extensive hunting trip in central Europe and the Balkans, via Frankfurt, Berlin, Vienna and Budapest.

Some sources say that Florence Baker began life in 1841 in Straßburg am Mieresch, Austrian Empire (today Aiud, Romania) as Barbara Maria von Sas.

[3] She may have been fourteen when she was being sold as a slave in Vidin, a town and fortified port on the River Danube in what was then the Ottoman Empire and is now in Bulgaria, in January 1859.

The details of how they met was meant to be kept secret but the story circulated and this resulted in Queen Victoria deciding to exclude Baker from court.

[9] In 1869 Samuel was invited by Isma'il Pasha, the Turkish Viceroy of Egypt, to return to Africa to help eliminate or reduce the trade in slaves around Gondokoro.

General Gordon arrived in February 1883 and requested that Samuel assist him in evacuating people from the besieged Khartoum during the Mahdist War in Egypt.

[1] In the 1901 United Kingdom census, Florence B. M. Baker was still living at Sandford, Orleigh, Highweek, and her age was stated as 58, her place of birth as Hungary.

Together with Delia Akeley, Christina Dodwell, Mary Kingsley and Alexine Tinne, she was one of the five subjects chosen for a 1997 book on women explorers in Africa.

[12] A memorial plaque commemorating her travels was unveiled by László Kövér, Speaker of the Hungarian National Assembly on 4 March 2019, on the 155th anniversary of her trip to search for the source of the Nile.