Welcome to our Web site!

Officially we are Anthony Geoffrey Cousins and Constance Lynn Ashley Sturdevant Cousins, however, you can call us Tony and Connie.

Tony was born in Manchester, England and moved to the USA in 1997 for an employment opportunity. Connie was born and raised in Dallas, Texas, USA. By sheer divine intervention we met and fell in love at the end of 2000 and married in January 2001.

We love genealogy research, doing the Sunday New York Times Crossword, Sudoku, traveling, and spending time with our grandkids and extended family. We are now both officially retired and decided to explore as much of the USA that we could, that meant buying a 37 foot motorhome and spending as much time in it as possible. Some of our travels are documented in our blog, the link on the left.

We seem to have reached a point in our research where we find less and less every time we look on Ancestry, so have, with some sadness, decided to post our full tree here, no more research.

  • "Searching in vain" - Connie's great great grandfather, Henry Thomas Baker, was from England and was an "artiste" and musician. His family traveled with different shows and while two of the four children were born in London another was born in Germany and one in France. We came to a brick wall in trying to find them between 1877 - 1901 and then after 1901 until Jeannette who is Henry Thomas Baker's great grand daughter found this site. We now know what happened, how names changed and generations have now been discovered. We had another bolt from the blue in the last 12 months - Howard Baker found our site - his grandfather was Augustus Baker - who used a stage name of Gus Chevalier and married a dancer from the Folies Bergere - another set of artistes. This does show that you need to keep looking and if possible publish your findings.

  • Finding living relatives - it's been very rewarding to find and become friends with Cousins relatives we didn't know existed! We have cousins in Suffolk that we try to visit each year during our annual trip to England. The Baker side took off when Jeannette a second cousin found our site and now Howard, another Baker relative, provided a wealth of new information that has opened many more doors.

  • Discovering things - sometimes we find a new person, track them through the census and civil records and bury them all in an hour or so! We get sad when we find infants dying within the year of birth and in one case where four children in one family all died within the same month along with a person we think is their grandmother [Mayhew]. We  did learn that there was an outbreak of malignant diphtheria that hit Suffolk in 1891.

  • Misspelled names - well it seems like they're misspelled! How many variations of Cousins and Sturdevant do you think there are? We haven't actually counted but there seems to be a jillion! At least soundex searches help discover some of the variations. We will also search a census using just a first name, location, and birth year range to see what adaptation the name has taken this time.

  • Royal Connections -  while there is not a proven link as yet within the Shelton lineage, it appears that Connie is a descendent of Anne Boleyn [yes, the one who married King Henry VIII and was later beheaded!]. That was a surprise, especially since Tony is from England - although we did find a Madam Cousins who attended Anne Boleyn at the wedding!

    We hope you enjoy the web site and that it helps in your research.

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