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## Conclusion: What DNA Settled and What It Couldn’t
In February 1984, Anna Anderson died of pneumonia in Charlottesville, Virginia, at approximately 82 years of age. She had claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov for more than sixty years. A German court had refused to say she was wrong. An army of believers had maintained her case across decades. She had married a man who called her Anastasia.
In September 1994, the DNA results were announced. In January 1995, the peer-reviewed paper appeared in Nature Genetics. The biological evidence was clear: the woman who had lived as Anna Anderson was not, genetically, a daughter of Nicholas II and Alexandra. Her mitochondrial DNA did not match the Romanov maternal line. It matched the Schanzkowska maternal line exactly.
What the DNA settled: the claim to Romanov identity. That claim was false, on the biological evidence, to a degree of certainty that the thirty-year German court proceedings had been unable to achieve by any other means.
What the DNA could not settle: the full interior history of how a young woman from Pomerania became the most famous royal impostor of the twentieth century. The DNA did not explain what happened in Berlin in February 1920 — the jump into the canal, the silence that followed, the eventual claim. It did not explain whether the claim was adopted deliberately, whether it was a response to genuine confusion, or whether it arose from some more complex mixture of the two. It did not describe the experience of living inside a claim across six decades, sustained by believers and contested by skeptics, through asylum stays and legal proceedings and transatlantic moves and a late marriage in Virginia.