Usain Bolt Family History

Usain St. Leo Bolt was born on August 21st, 1986 to Wellesley and Jennifer Bolt in Sherwood Content, a small rural village in Trelawny parish, Jamaica.

Usain was not a problem child.  His only weakness, his mother said, was that he loved to play games, so much so that he has been into hand-held games since he was small.  He ran the gamut from Nintendo to Play Station and all the latest inventions.  He would also spend time playing cricket and football on the street with his younger brother Sadiki.

By the age of twelve Usain was the fastest runner at his local school.  The village staple of yams gave him his lightning speed, according to his father.

By the time he was fifteen he had grown to the height of six feet five inches.  As an athlete, he physically stood out amongst his contemporaries.  He competed in the 2002 World Junior Championships in Kingston and, a month shy of his sixteenth birthday, was the winner at 200 metres.  His future athletic career seemed set.

Lightning Bolt.  Usain found a coach and turned professional in 2004.  He made his base in Kingston.  He and his brother Sadiki shared a place in Norbrook, a suburban area of Kingston near the national athletics stadium.

His years of greatness spanned the period 2008 to 2016:

• he gained worldwide fame for his double sprint victory in world record times at the Beijing 2008 Olympics.  And he is the only sprinter to have won the Olympic 100 and 200 metre titles at three consecutive Olympics.  He also won two Olympic 4 × 100 relay gold medals.
• and he has been the most successful male athlete in the World Championships.  He is the first athlete to win four World Championship titles in the 200 metres and is one of the most successful in the 100 metres with three titles over this period.

But what endeared him to the global audence were not so much his victories nor his world record times, but the manner of their achievement.

He was a showman.  And he was huge.  He seemed to eat up the yards as he ran with a joy and an insoucience of what he was doing.  The audience once gasped at his audacity as he slowed himself down at the end of a world record run.  After the drug history of recent runners, he was a breath of fresh air.

Post-Athletics.  His athletics career ended with the 2017 season.  At the end of that year he unveiled a statue of himself in his signature “lightning bolt” pose at the National Stadium in Kingston.

He has remained a global celebrity.  He has also involved himself in dancehall music production and become an entrepreneur, starting up an electric scooter company.  In 2023, however, he fell victim to a fraud scheme.  He has subsequently experienced difficulty in recovering his lost money.

The Bolt Name

The Bolt surname originated in Europe and was found first in Norway and later in England and Holland.  The early spellings in England were Bold and Bolde.  The name seems to have derived from the Anglo-Saxon bold, meaning a small farm.

The Bolts in England total some 3,000 today, those in Jamaica about 600.  Probably Usain’s extended family accounts for a good share of the Jamaican numbers.

Coastal and Rural Jamaica

Records for Usain’s family began on the maternal side with his grandmother Monica Davis.  She was born  in Falmouth, Jamaica around 1943.  This coastal town in Trelawny parish lay on the north shore of Jamaica roughly halfway between Ocho Rios and Montego Bay.

Coastal Falmouth.  Known today as Miss Monica, Monica Davis has been a resident of Falmouth all of her life.  She indeed raised eight children there, of which Jennifer – Usain’s mother – was the fifth-born.  She brought them up on strict religious values.

Falmouth, founded in 1770, had been developed by the British as an early market center and loading terminal for Jamaican sugar and rum.  That business in Falmouth was in decline by the mid-19th century.  But the town had been left with some pretty impressive early colonial architecture.  And the tourist trade is being promoted as cruise ships have begun to stop there.

Rural Sherwood Content.  This village in Trelawny parish where Usain was born and grew up is located some 28 miles south of Falmouth, accessible by a narrow bumpy road passing through the rainforest and its overgrown vegetation.  The village lies in Cockpit Country that had from early times been the preserve of free Jamaican Maroons.

Sherwood Content has a health center, primary and secondary school, church, post office, and today a Usain Bolt gift shop.  Usain’s aunt Lillian Bolt-Smith, known as Miss Lillie, has run the local bar and shop selling memorabilia and advocating community development.

And In Neighboring St. Ann Parish.  These Bolts did not originate in Trelawny parish but in neighboring St. Ann parish where they had been farmers.  Usain’s father Wellesley was born in 1956 at Lime Tree Garden in St. Ann, the fifth of six children of Cyril and Maude Bolt.

In the 1960’s the American company Kaiser Aluminium began mining bauxite in this area.  They consequently set about resettling its farmers, including the Bolts.  Some moved to nearby Browns Town.  But the Bolts resettled in Windsor near Sherwood Content in Trelawny parish.

These Bolts in their totality are a sizeable family.  On Boxing Day 2013 some two hundred Bolts, including the track superstar Usain Bolt, turned up for a family reunion at Discovery Bay in St. Ann.  Another notable descendant attending and a planner for the event was the Rev. Errol Bolt, a pastor in St. Andrew parish.

Wellesley and Jennifer Bolt

Usain’s father Wellesley – known to his family and friends as Gideon – had been born in the neighboring parish of St. Ann in 1956.  But he grew up in Windsor in Trelawny parish and attended the nearby primary school in Sherwood Content.

Wellesley was the father of two children before he married his wife Jennifer.  Indeed Usain’s younger brother Sadiki, born in 1986 eight months after Usain was born, was the son of a different mother.  This brother, as well as an older sister, grew up in Kingston a hundred miles away.

Wellesley and Jennifer made their home in the small village of Sherwood Content.  Between 1986 and 2002 Wellesley had worked as a supervisor for the Jamaican Coffee Industry Board.  After that he ran a small grocery shop until his retirement in 2017 following a stroke.

His wife Jennifer apparently did not much care for Wellesley when they first met in 1984.  She was absorbed in the young people’s club at her Falmouth church, the Seventh-day Adventist; while Wellesley was at that time a Baptist.  And Jennifer lived in Falmouth with a very strict mother.

But Wellesley pursued her.  They had Usain in 1986 and married in 1998 when their child “Lightning Bolt” was twelve years old.  The family became Adventist in its churchgoing.

Wellesley, having survived a stroke in 2017, passed away in 2025.  He was remembered at his funeral as a community man, quiet and unassuming in his ways, and a good father and motivator for his son Usain.

Such was Usain’s fame that the Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness offered his own tribute:

“I join with every Jamaican in extending my deepest and most sincere condolences to Usain Bolt, his beloved mother Mrs. Jennifer Bolt and the entire Bolt family, following the passing of their patriarch Mr. Wellesley Bolt.”