The Blay family don't often get to meet up with each other.
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That's why Natalie Eggleston (nee Blay) organised a family reunion for the first time in 30 years at the Goulburn Soldiers Club on Saturday, November 5.
The event, which was four months in the making, was mainly for Ms Eggleston's 84-year-old father Bob Blay who was the only sibling still alive out of seven children.
"I decided to hold the reunion because family members were spread out across the country and not everyone had met yet," Eggleston said.
"We had 145 people travel from Queensland, Victoria and NSW."
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Blay's family history
Bob's great grandfather Thomas was born in 1785 in Berkshire in the United Kingdom and brought his wife and three children, including Bob's father Charles, to Australia in 1829 on a ship.
Charles was born in 1851 and moved to Myrtleville, 5km south of Taralga, in 1865 where he had a family of 10 children.
By 1874, most of Charles' family had moved to Crookwell, leaving him on 68 acres of leased land.
He built cow bails 100 yards south of the house and a slab dairy, approximately where the present machinery shed is situated.
He supplied milk to Boardman's Myrtleville butter factory and their records show that through the 1890's, he was supplying 12 to 25 gallons per day depending on the time of the year, for three threepence a gallon and could buy the skim milk back at one penny for 10 gallons to feed his pigs.
Bob's father Harold, who was married to Cora and was the youngest son of Charles, stayed at Myrtleville to care for his aging parents.
The family continued dairying and supplying cream to the factory until its closure in 1910.
In the 1940s, the original old Blay home was falling into a state of disrepair, so with a large family of his own and other family members to provide for, as was the way in those days, a new home was needed.
Harold set about that task at the end of WWII.
Members of the Blay family still live in Myrtleville to this day.
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