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## The Final Resting Places: A Study in Contrast
There is a certain finality in the physical dispersal of the principals in this story — where each person, or their remains, ultimately came to rest.
Anastasia Romanov, or the remains identified as those of a Romanov daughter (and disputed as to whether they are specifically Anastasia’s), rests in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg, in the family vault that received the 1991 grave remains in 1998. Whether the naming dispute is ever resolved, the remains are with the family.
Anna Anderson — the woman whose biological material matched the Schanzkowska line — was cremated and buried at Castle Seeon in Bavaria, the estate of the Leuchtenberg family where she had lived in the early 1930s under the patronage of Duke George of Leuchtenberg, who had believed in her claim. The grave marker carries the name she had used for most of her adult life.
The contrast is significant. Anastasia’s remains, disputed but scientifically identified, rest in a cathedral of the Russian Orthodox Church with her parents and sisters. Anderson’s ashes rest in a Bavarian estate, under a name that was not the name she was born with and not the name the DNA indicated she had been born as — but the name she had maintained, through decades of litigation and advocacy and a late-life marriage in Virginia, for more than sixty years.
The physical ending of each story reflects the nature of each life: one cut short by revolutionary violence at seventeen, the other extended across eight or nine decades in the persistent and ultimately unverifiable claim of an impossible survival.