Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova was born June 5th 1901, the youngest of four daughters born to Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra Fyodorovna of Russia. Her birth was a disappointment to Russia, as the country had hoped that Alexandra would provide her husband with a son and heir.Alexandra liked to nurse her children herself, and both Nicholas and Alexandra spent a great deal of time with their children. The daughters of the Tsar were raised simply; the slept on camp beds, took cold baths in the morning and were expected to keep their rooms clean. Anastasia and her older sister Maria, 'the little pair', shared a room, while the elder two (Olga and Tatiana, 'the big pair') shared a room. Empress Alexandra liked to dress the little pair in light colours and the big pair in dark colours.Anastasia was an energetic and playful child. She had blue eyes and golden blonde hair and greatly resembled her mother. She liked climbing trees, running, and playing practical jokes. She also loved to act and mimic people. Once she wrapped a rock in a snowball and threw it at her sister Tatiana, who was knocked to the ground. She had a special bond with her brother Tsarevitch Alexei, the heir, who was born in 1904.Russia entered World War I in 1914. Empress Alexandra and the Grand Duchesses Olga and Tatiana became nurses in hospitals, but Maria and Anastasia were considered too young to work. They often visited hospitals to play cards with injured and sick soldiers and cheer them up.The 1917 Russian Revolution ended Anastasia's happy childhood. Nicholas II was forced to abdicate and was exiled to Tobolsk (then Ekaterinburg) in Siberia with his family. A year later, on July 16th 1918, the entire family - parents, all five children, and devoted servants - were murdered on orders from the Bolshevik government.In 1920, a young woman who had attempted suicide in Berlin claimed that she was the Grand Duchess Anastasia and that she had feigned death in order to escape from the Bolsheviks. Anna Anderson (as she was soon known) never once wavered from her claim despite the doubts of Anastasia's surviving relatives, including Olga Alexandrovna, the sister of Nicholas II and Anastasia's godmother; Princess Irene, the sister of Empress Alexandra; Peirre Giliard, tutor to the imperial children; and Felix Yussopov, Rasputin's killer. Supporters of Anna Anderson included Gleb Botkin, the son of the Romanovs' doctor and a childhood friend of Anastasia. (Although it is often said that Nicholas II's mother Marie Fyodorovna, who died in 1928, agreed that Anderson was Anastasia, in reality she never met any of the women claiming to be Anastasia because she did not want to admit her family had been killed.) DNA tests conducted after Anna Anderson's death in 1984 have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was in fact a Polish peasant named Franziska Schanzkowska. It is thought by some that Schanzkowska suffered from a psychosis that led her to sincerely believe she was the Grand Duchess. . In 1991, the remains of Nicholas, Alexandra, and three of their daughters were uncovered in a mass grave outside of Ekaterinburg. Scientists could not determine with absolute certainty which daughter was not in the mass grave, but circumstantial evidence pointed to Marie being the missing daughter. Her remains and that of her brother Alexei may have been found in 2007 near the original grave site.The Grand Duchess Anastasia was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000 as a passion bearer, and is now referred to by the Church as St. Anastasia Romanova. Show less «