Contemporary accounts of Anderson’s life, supporters, and skeptics were drawn from Wikiwand’s comprehensive biography, The Vintage News, Historicmysteries.com, Encyclopedia.com, and Refinery29’s coverage of the German court proceedings.
Readers interested in the primary scientific record are directed to the Stoneking et al. 1995 Nature Genetics paper and the Coble et al. 2009 PLOS One paper, both of which are available through academic library access or, in the case of the PLOS One paper, through open-access archives.
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## What Prince Philip’s Contribution Made Possible
The role of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, in the Romanov identification is worth examining in its own right, because his participation made the entire comparison possible — and because the logic of why his DNA was relevant is not immediately obvious to a general audience.
Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, born Princess Alix of Hesse, was the daughter of Ludwig IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, and Princess Alice of the United Kingdom. Princess Alice was a daughter of Queen Victoria. Prince Philip’s maternal grandmother was Princess Victoria of Hesse, who was Princess Alice’s daughter and therefore Tsarina Alexandra’s sister.
This means that Tsarina Alexandra and Prince Philip’s maternal grandmother were sisters. Their mitochondrial DNA — inherited through the maternal line from Princess Alice — was therefore the same. And Prince Philip, having inherited his mtDNA from his mother, and she from her mother (Princess Victoria), and she from Princess Alice, carried the Romanov maternal mtDNA profile into the late twentieth century.
When Prince Philip donated blood in 1994 for use in the Romanov identification project, he was providing the reference against which both the Ekaterinburg remains and Anderson’s tissue could be compared. His profile established what Anastasia’s mtDNA should have looked like. The comparison was valid because the chain of maternal inheritance from Princess Alice to Philip, and from Princess Alice to Alexandra and her daughters, was documented and unambiguous.