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Anastasia was a younger sister of Grand Duchess Olga, Grand Duchess Tatiana and Grand Duchess Maria, and was an elder sister of Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia. She was murdered with her family on July 17, 1918 by forces of the Bolshevik secret police. Persistent rumors of her possible escape have circulated since her death, fueled by the fact that the location of her burial was unknown during the decades of Communist rule. The mass grave near Ekaterinburg which held the remains of the Tsar, his wife, and three daughters was revealed in 1991, but the bodies of Alexei Nikolaevich and one of his sisters - either Anastasia or her older sister Maria - were not discovered there. Her possible survival has been entirely disproven. In January 2008, Russian scientists announced that the charred remains of a young boy and a young woman found near Ekaterinburg in August 2007 were most likely those of the thirteen-year-old Tsarevich and one of the four Romanov grand duchesses. Russian forensic scientists confirmed on April 30, 2008 that the remains were those of the Tsarevich Alexei and one of his four sisters. In March 2009, the final results of the DNA testing were published by Dr. Michael Coble of the US Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, proving once and for all that the remains of all four Grand Duchesses have now been accounted for, and no one escaped. Several women have falsely claimed to have been Anastasia, the most notorious of whom was Anna Anderson. Anderson's body was cremated upon her death in 1984, but DNA testing in 1994 on available pieces of Anderson's tissue and hair showed no relation to DNA of the Imperial family. |
