its own reward for Anna Anderson, who received a share of the royalties.
If Anna Anderson, the most convincing of the claimants, was not Anastasia, perhaps the Grand Duchess had perished with her sisters after all. The pit contained the bodies of only three girls. Two bodies, those of one of the Grand Duchesses and the Crown Prince the Tsarevich Alexei, are still missing. Alexei, too, has had his impersonators. A Soviet sailor, Nikolai Dalsky, persisted in his claim to the imperial crown, which in Soviet Russia showed a certain self-confidence, until he died in 1965. His son, âNikolai Romanovâ, inherited the claim on his fatherâs death and refers to his own son Vladimir as the Tsarevich. However, the truth is almost certainly that the whole family were killed. Written reports, for what they are worth, record that the men whose job it was to dispose of the bodies first tried to burn them in the woods near the site of the pit where the remains were found. They built a pyre and put on it first the smallest body, that of Alexei, then one of the Grand Duchesses, doused them in petrol and set fire to them. But the flames did not consume everything. Teeth and fragments of bones lay near the fire. The plan was changed and the rest of the bodies were flung into the shallow pit. If that version of events is true, the last remains of Alexei and Anastasia lie not in the graves of the pretenders but charred and burnt beneath the leaf litter of a wood in the Russian Urals.
Though I like the odd vodka, I have never considered myself a Romanov; but I couldnât help noticing that my own DNA sequence matched that of Tsar Nicholas II. If we ignore for the moment the minor component of the Tsarâs DNA introduced by heteroplasmy at position 169, we both have the notation 126, 294,296. Had my grandmother decided to pursue a claim to be Anastasia (most unlikely, since she came from Norfolk and never went to Russia) then it could not have been disproved by the same DNA test that eventually unmasked Anna Anderson. Does it mean that I am related to the Romanovs, even distantly? The amazing answer is âyesâ.
This is the point to stop and take in one entirely logical yet utterly extraordinary fact which forms the basis of a lot of what this book is about. If any two people trace their maternal line back â through mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and so on â eventually the two lines will converge on one woman. If the two people are brothers or sisters, then it is simple: their maternal lines meet in their mother. If the two people are cousins, the children of two sisters, then the lines converge on their shared maternal grandmother. Even though most people who have not researched their family trees will lose the trail not far beyond that, the principle is maintained no matter how long you go back into the past. Any two people, in your family, your town, your country â even the whole world â are linked through their mothers and their mothersâ mothers to a common maternal ancestor. The only difference between any two people is this: How long ago did this woman live?
Further than a handful of generations back, the written records of most maternal connections are completely lost to us, so we just would not know the answer to this question. But the DNA doesnât forget. The mitochondrial DNA, because of its special inheritance exclusively through the female line, traces exactly that path back in time. And because the sequence of mitochondrial DNA changes due to random mutations, albeit very slowly, we can use it as a sort of clock. If two people shared a common maternal ancestor in the recent past, then their mitochondrial DNA will not have had time to change through mutation. Like the hamsters, their mitochondrial DNA sequences will be exactly the same. If she, the common ancestor, lived further back in time then there is a chance that a mutation will have occurred somewhere along one or
If Anna Anderson, the most convincing of the claimants, was not Anastasia, perhaps the Grand Duchess had perished with her sisters after all. The pit contained the bodies of only three girls. Two bodies, those of one of the Grand Duchesses and the Crown Prince the Tsarevich Alexei, are still missing. Alexei, too, has had his impersonators. A Soviet sailor, Nikolai Dalsky, persisted in his claim to the imperial crown, which in Soviet Russia showed a certain self-confidence, until he died in 1965. His son, âNikolai Romanovâ, inherited the claim on his fatherâs death and refers to his own son Vladimir as the Tsarevich. However, the truth is almost certainly that the whole family were killed. Written reports, for what they are worth, record that the men whose job it was to dispose of the bodies first tried to burn them in the woods near the site of the pit where the remains were found. They built a pyre and put on it first the smallest body, that of Alexei, then one of the Grand Duchesses, doused them in petrol and set fire to them. But the flames did not consume everything. Teeth and fragments of bones lay near the fire. The plan was changed and the rest of the bodies were flung into the shallow pit. If that version of events is true, the last remains of Alexei and Anastasia lie not in the graves of the pretenders but charred and burnt beneath the leaf litter of a wood in the Russian Urals.
Though I like the odd vodka, I have never considered myself a Romanov; but I couldnât help noticing that my own DNA sequence matched that of Tsar Nicholas II. If we ignore for the moment the minor component of the Tsarâs DNA introduced by heteroplasmy at position 169, we both have the notation 126, 294,296. Had my grandmother decided to pursue a claim to be Anastasia (most unlikely, since she came from Norfolk and never went to Russia) then it could not have been disproved by the same DNA test that eventually unmasked Anna Anderson. Does it mean that I am related to the Romanovs, even distantly? The amazing answer is âyesâ.
This is the point to stop and take in one entirely logical yet utterly extraordinary fact which forms the basis of a lot of what this book is about. If any two people trace their maternal line back â through mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and so on â eventually the two lines will converge on one woman. If the two people are brothers or sisters, then it is simple: their maternal lines meet in their mother. If the two people are cousins, the children of two sisters, then the lines converge on their shared maternal grandmother. Even though most people who have not researched their family trees will lose the trail not far beyond that, the principle is maintained no matter how long you go back into the past. Any two people, in your family, your town, your country â even the whole world â are linked through their mothers and their mothersâ mothers to a common maternal ancestor. The only difference between any two people is this: How long ago did this woman live?
Further than a handful of generations back, the written records of most maternal connections are completely lost to us, so we just would not know the answer to this question. But the DNA doesnât forget. The mitochondrial DNA, because of its special inheritance exclusively through the female line, traces exactly that path back in time. And because the sequence of mitochondrial DNA changes due to random mutations, albeit very slowly, we can use it as a sort of clock. If two people shared a common maternal ancestor in the recent past, then their mitochondrial DNA will not have had time to change through mutation. Like the hamsters, their mitochondrial DNA sequences will be exactly the same. If she, the common ancestor, lived further back in time then there is a chance that a mutation will have occurred somewhere along one or
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