Only the remains of Tsarevich Alexis and one of the younger daughters (either Maria or Anastasia) have not been found. Their bodies are believed to have been incinerated.

As we now know, the imperial family was killed because the city where they were being held by the Red Army was soon to be overrun by the anticommunists. In the midst of the chaos of civil war, the Bolshevik leaders, thousands of miles away in the Kremlin, deemed it expedient to kill the Romanovs rather than risk their capture during evacuation to a safer place.

Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheveks overthrew the Romanovs, imprisoning Anastasia and her family in Siberia until 1918 when they were murdered by Bolshevik soldiers. The bodies were buried in a secret location.

In the 1920’s a previously unknown woman in a mental hospital in Germany began claiming that she was Anastasia Romanov. She continued to make these claims up until her death in 1984, and arguably not without reason. There had been rumors that some of the members of the Tsar’s family had escaped the soldiers and as the woman had the same eye color, hair color, height, and body markings as the Romanov princess (including a deformed foot), most of the Russian public was not hesitant to accept the woman known as Anastasia Anderson to be the real Anastasia Romanov.

Then in 1991, the remains of the Romanov family were found and exhumed in Siberia. Portions of skeletons were found and the remains were identified as the Tsarina three of her female children using mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA is inherited solely from one’s mother. Once DNA was extracted from the skeletons, it was compared to that of the most recent maternal relative, Prince Philip of England; and as all four DNA samples matched that of the prince, it was confirmed that the nine skeletons that had been found included those of the Tsarina and three of her female children. Similar methods were used to confirm the identities of the other skeletons including that of Tsar Nicholas using mitochondrial DNA from James, Duke of Fife. However, it was concluded that the bodies of Princess Anastasia and Prince Alexei had not been found.