And the case matters for the development of a culture that takes biological evidence seriously as a form of historical testimony — that understands what DNA can and cannot say, and that is equipped to distinguish between the biological facts it establishes and the human facts (of motivation, intention, and experience) that it cannot reach.
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## The Romanov Children: A Final Accounting
At the center of the Anna Anderson story is a family: Nicholas II and Alexandra and their five children, killed in a basement in Ekaterinburg in the early hours of July 17, 1918, and buried in a wooded area outside the city in an effort to prevent their graves from becoming sites of counterrevolutionary veneration.
The effort to suppress the location of their deaths succeeded for decades. The 1979 discovery by Avdonin, kept quiet during the Soviet era, was the beginning of the end of that suppression. The 1991 public disclosure and excavation, the 1994 identification through DNA comparison with Prince Philip, the 1998 reinterment, the 2007 discovery, and the 2008–2009 identification of Alexei and the final daughter completed the physical accounting.
All five children are now accounted for: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei. They died together. Their remains, separated by the circumstances of the burial, have been reunited in scientific identification if not in physical location — the 2007 remains were not, as of the period covered by these sources, formally incorporated into the cathedral reinterment, pending the resolution of the Church’s acceptance of the identification.
The woman who claimed for sixty years to be one of them — to be the youngest daughter, Anastasia, the one whose spirit and youth had seemed most incongruous with a mass execution — was not among them. She was someone else’s daughter, from a different family, a different country, a different life. The DNA said so clearly.