Trove Tuesday – A Big Blow!

Continuing on from my last blog post about my great great grandmother’s family, I thought I would investigate whether the family in the picture could include some of Janie’s brothers and sisters. The photo did have written on it “Grenfell family” but that wasn’t to say they were all Grenfells. ‘Janie’ was Mary Jane BLUETT prior to her marriage to James GRENFELL.

Janie was one of the seven surviving children of Phillip BLUETT (1839-1899) and Mary Jane HUNN (c1837-1897) of Cornwall. Phillip and Mary Jane, along with two of their three daughters, arrived in Victoria barely a month before their first son (another) Phillip BLUETT was born in Eaglehawk in April 1871.

Young Phillip met with an accident with gunpowder when he was 12 years old, but obviously survived. See the Trove article.

I have now traced this Phillip to Western Australia. He seems to have moved around quite a lot, following the mining industry.

In 1893, he married South Australian-born Laura MORGAN in Victoria. Their first child’s birth was registered in Bendigo Victoria, the second in Cobar, NSW, the third in Orange NSW, the fourth in Fryers Creek (near Castlemaine) Victoria, the fifth in Boulder (Kalgoorlie) Western Australia and the sixth in Perth Western Australia.

After Laura died in 1918, he married Florence HEY in Perth in 1921.

The fifth child had one of the more interesting names in my family tree, 

especially when read aloud with the surname:

Hector Cyclone Bluett – and he obviously wasn’t ashamed of his middle name – see the Trove article. So often family notices only include initials, but not this one.

So, where did the ‘Cyclone’ come from?

I thought ‘maybe he was born in the middle of a cyclone’ – Western Australia is well known for them (one is bearing down on the mid north coast now). But they are not so common inland.

So, back to Trove.

There were a couple of cyclones possible for his 1904 birth registration:

16 Dec 1903: “a thunderstorm of cyclonic force” swept across Kalgoorlie and Boulder; and

29 Dec 1904: “a terrific rainstorm, travelling practically in the same direction, and almost equally with the force of that which caused so much damage to and destruction of Kalgoorlie-Boulder properties 12 months ago, swept over the district this afternoon.”

Hector went on to live marry and live until 1974. I wonder if he passed his middle name down in his family.

And, so, I got distracted from the rest of the Bluetts and whether they could be in the photo with Janie. Another time!