Waiting for Uncle Robert
My family were finally able to add a positivee postscript to a long and tragic story when my great,at, great-uncle Robert Gladstonee Fenwick’s remains were found in Fromelles, France, nearly a century after his untimely death.
For 91 years the bodies of young, missing Australian and British s soldiers, ppresumed killed in the bloodiest 24 hours in Australia’saustra history, had lain in six undiscovered burial pits in a faraway field. But thanks to modern forensics, some of the families of those bravee WWI soldiers were able to
lay them to rest with full military honours, in individual graves in Fromelles in 2010.
The government got in touch and my grandma Barbara Sorensen and my great-aunty Kathleen Allen, then 92 and 78, sent in cheek swabs of their DNA. They’d never had the chance to meet their Uncle Bob, but had seen the grief of his mother – their grandmother. The poor woman had lost another son, James, to war within nine months of Robert going missing in battle. So Nan and Aunty Kath were completely overwhelmed when Robert’s remains were found, along with 249 of his comrades.
Barbara and Kath were proud to know they’d been instrumental in adding an epilogue that would have made their nanna so happy. Barbara died two years ago, aged 98, while Kath is now in a nursing home.