She was not who she said she was. What she was, exactly — in the full human sense — is a harder question, and one that the available evidence does not fully answer.
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## A Final Note on the Science of Identity
The word “identity” carries two very different meanings in the context of this case.
In the forensic and biological sense, identity is a matter of physical fact: which biological line a person descends from, which family their cells belong to, what their genetic profile reveals about their maternal and paternal lineages. This kind of identity is what DNA measures, and it admits of clear answers. Anna Anderson’s biological identity, in this sense, was established by the 1994 testing with a degree of certainty that the thirty-year legal proceedings had been unable to achieve.
In the human and existential sense, identity is what a person makes of themselves across a life: the name they use, the story they tell, the relationships they sustain, the claims they maintain in the face of challenge. This kind of identity is not what DNA measures, and it does not admit of simple answers. The woman who lived as Anna Anderson — who married as Anna Anderson, who was buried as Anna Anderson, who insisted on being called Anastasia for sixty years and whose husband and supporters sustained that insistence — had an identity in this second sense that was not dissolved by the biological evidence, even though the biological evidence clearly contradicted the specific content of the claim.