After the Russian Provisional Government was overthrown by the more extreme Bolsheviks in October 1917, Nicholas, his wife, their children and several members of the family's staff were moved to Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, where, in July 1918, they were executed. Their bodies were hidden and remained lost to time for nearly a century — until modern technology, with some help from the British royal family, unraveled the fascinating story of their disappearance.
I was sitting in a lecture theatre at Cambridge University in 1994 when one of my lecturers, Erika Hagelberg, spoke about a new study she had just been involved in. It was the first major case to combine both mitochondrial DNA and DNA fingerprinting to identify human remains: those of the Russian imperial family.
The Russian royal family, the Romanovs, had been the reigning imperial dynasty since 1617, and three centuries later, Tsar Nicholas II was on the throne. Nicholas was the cousin of George V, king of the United Kingdom, their mothers being sisters, and had married George's cousin Princess Alix (Alexandra) of Hesse, who was apparently Queen Victoria's favourite grandchild. Nicholas and Alix had five children, four daughters (Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia) and a son, Alexei.
The Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, 1919. (Image credit: Heritage Images via Getty Images)
Ironically, the new Russian government had wanted to get the Romanovs out of Russia due to the risk of their becoming a rallying point, but a plan to grant asylum to the Romanovs in the U.K. because of their links with the British royal family fell through, owing to a reluctance on the part of George V to grant it. Yet those links with the British royal family would eventually prove crucial in their identification.
These included examining the bones, to determine approximate age and sex, and some of the teeth, the expensive dental work, incorporating gold, platinum and porcelain, indicating that certain remains must belong to members of an aristocratic family. The team worked out that the two missing individuals would have been two of the children, one of the daughters (while it was hard to determine which one it would be, given how close in age they were, it was thought that it was either Maria or Anastasia) and the son, Prince Alexei.
Next, they needed to prove that this was the Russian royal family, and they did this using mitochondrial DNA analysis. As you'll remember, mitochondrial DNA is passed down by a mother to all her children, male and female, but only daughters can pass it on — so if female-line family members of Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra could be found and would agree to give a DNA test, their mitochondrial DNA should match that of their royal ancestors. It just so happened that the late Prince Philip, husband of the late Queen Elizabeth, was related to the tsarina through the female line: she was his great-aunt, his maternal grandmother being the sister of the tsarina. He kindly gave a DNA sample.
Prince Philip's DNA was eventually used to confirm the identities of the lost Romanov family. (Image credit: Tim Graham via Getty Images)
When the team sequenced these two regions, Prince Philip's mitochondrial DNA was found to match that of the putative remains of the tsarina and her daughters. Next they found two living female-line relatives of the tsar, descended from his maternal grandmother: a great-great-niece, Princess Xenia Cheremeteff Sfiris, and a first cousin twice removed, James Carnegie, 3rd Duke of Fife. The mitochondrial DNA from these two matched each other perfectly, and they, in turn, matched that of the tsar, except at one base where there was both a match and a mismatch.
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The case was solved in terms of identifying the tsar, tsarina and three of their daughters, but the mystery still remained as to what had happened to the two other children. In the scientific paper reporting the results, the authors conjectured that possibly the two children had been buried separately, or that they could have survived the massacre. Incidentally, there was a woman living in the U.S. who claimed to be Anastasia, saying she had managed to escape being executed, and so the fact that two of the children were missing from the Romanov family group only fuelled the idea that maybe she truly was the missing princess.
Adapted from The Secrets of Our DNA: How Genetics Has Changed the World by Turi King. Published by Pegasus Books. Copyright © 2026. All rights reserved.
Pegasus Books The Secrets of Our DNA: How Genetics Has Changed the World
From an award-winning expert on DNA, discover the myth-busting book that opens a dazzling window into the world of modern genetics.
Fascinating, compassionate, and entirely captivating, The Secrets of Our DNA is the essential book that explains how genetics has changed and transformed the world around us.
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