[Fred Nerks]

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Meant to do this ages ago, now you have reminded me. Seems that if the family was LATVIAN, and their name was BEIKER, they may have changed the spelling to BAKER.

Same goes for the YIDDISH, BIEKER. People from europe who changed their surnames usually retained a similarity to the original.

I think Nidesand came from Ndesandjo. It has a dutch-colonial ring to it, and there are Nidesands in South Africa, which made me wonder at one time, if Ruth may not have been a foreign student herself. What-ever and who-ever she is/was, her background seems to start with Sally Jacob's identification of her as Ruth (Beatrice) Baker:

Image supposedly from 1951.

[Greenperson]

Ruth was Lithuanian. The translation of Baker to Lithuanian gives us Kepėjas. Your link says Baker in Latvian could also be either Maiznieks or Maiznīca. But since she's Lithuanian, perhaps the family name was originally Kepejas. Even so, Latvia and Lithuania are close to each other and different ethnicities were represented. Lithuanian Jews were often communists. Nidesand could just be what some reporter "heard" when Ruth's family was first mentioned in association with Obama. On the other hand, they may have deliberately obfuscated the story. Census records refer to her father as "Russian".