**2018:** Russia’s Investigative Committee confirms identifications.
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## The Legacy of the Anderson Case in Forensic Science
The Anna Anderson case played a role in establishing DNA analysis as a tool for resolving historical identity questions — not because it was the first such use (the Romanov identification project had already demonstrated that DNA could address historical cases of this type), but because it was among the first cases in which DNA evidence was used to definitively close a contested public identity question that had resisted resolution through other means.
The case contributed to the development of protocols for extracting DNA from paraffin-preserved tissue — a technique that has since been applied to many historical samples. The demonstration that usable DNA could be recovered from tissue preserved in paraffin for fifteen years (in Anderson’s case) and from bone preserved in soil for more than seventy years (in the Romanov grave case) expanded the temporal horizon of forensic genetics considerably.
Peter Gill, the British forensic scientist who worked on both the Anderson testing and the Romanov grave identification, became a significant figure in forensic genetics and continued to publish on methodology for extracting and analyzing DNA from degraded historical samples. His work on the Romanov and Anderson cases is cited in the development of laboratory standards for historical DNA analysis.
The methodology developed and refined in the Romanov and Anderson cases has been applied subsequently to a range of historical questions: the identification of individuals killed in mass atrocities, the resolution of disputes about historical figures, and the analysis of archaeological remains. Each of these applications builds on the technical and methodological advances that the early 1990s work on Russian imperial remains helped establish.