Anderson died in 1984 and her body was cremated. In 1994, a tissue sample from Andersen in a hospital was used for DNA tests with the blood of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Prince Philip was a grandnephew of Empress Alexandra. Dr. Gill, who did the tests, decided that if "you accept that these samples came from Anna Anderson, then Anna Anderson could related to Tsar Nicholas or Tsarina Alexandra." Anderson's DNA matched with a great-nephew of Franziska Schanzkowska, a missing Polish factory worker. Some people who supported Anderson agreed that the DNA tests showed she could not have been the Grand Duchess.
At least 10 women claimed to be Anastasia. Less famous people who pretended to be Anastasia were Nadezhda Ivanovna Vasilyeva and Eugenia Smith. A priest took care of two young women who said that they were Anastasia and her sister Maria in the Ural Mountains in 1919. They lived there as nuns until they died in 1964. They were buried with the names Anastasia and Maria Nikolaevna.
People reported that trains and houses were being searched for 'Anastasia Romanov' by soldiers and secret police. When she was put in prison for a short time at Perm in 1918, Princess Helena Petrovna, the wife of Anastasia's distant cousin, Prince Ioann Konstantinovich of Russia, said that a guard took a girl who called herself Anastasia Romanova to her cell and asked her if the girl was the Tsar's daughter. When she did not recognize the girl, the guard took her away. Others in Perm later said that they saw Anastasia, her mother and sisters in Perm after they were killed, but this was only a rumor. Surprisingly, the rumors that had started to hide the fact that the family was dead helped the rumors that they were alive. A few days after they had been killed, the German government sent telegrams to Russia asking for "the safety of the princesses of German blood". Russia had signed a peace treaty with the Germans and did not want to tell them that the women were dead. Instead, they told them they had been moved to a safer place. This could have been why the 'Perm stories' began.
Another time, eight people said that they saw a young woman being captured at a railway station at Siding 37 in September 1918 after trying to escape. These people were Maxim Grigoyev, Tatiana Sitnikova and her son Fyodor Sitnikov, Ivan Kuklin and Matrina Kuklina, Vassily Ryabov, Ustinya Varankina, and Dr. Pavel Utkin. Some of these people said that the girl was Anastasia when they saw photographs of the grand duchess by White Russian Army investigators. Dr. Pavel Utkin also told the investigators that the girl, whom he had helped in Perm when she was hurt, had said, "I am the daughter of the ruler, Anastasia." During that time, there were similar stories of young people in Russia saying that they were Romanovs who had escaped. Boris Soloviev, the husband of Rasputin's daughter Maria, defrauded many important Russian families by asking for money for a Romanov to escape to China. Soloviev was helped by young women who pretended to be one of the grand duchesses to help trick the families.
Some suggest that there might have been a way for a guard to save anyone in the family who still lived. Yakov Yurovsky ordered the guards to come to his office and give him the things they had stolen after the murder. At that time, it is said that there was a short time when the killed bodies were left in the truck and in the basement of the house. Some guards who had not joined in the murders and had felt sorry for the grand duchesses were left in the basement with the bodies.
There were also stories from Bulgaria that Anastasia and her brother were still alive. In 1953, Peter Zamiatkin told a 16-year-old person being treated at a hospital that he had taken Anastasia and Alexei to the village where he was born near Odessa. He said he was a member of the guard of the Romanovs, and that the Tsar had asked him to do this. Zamiatkin said that after the rest of the family had been killed, he escaped with the children on a ship. "Anastasia" and "Alexei" lived under false names in the Bulgarian town of Gabarevo. The Bulgarian "Anastasia" called herself Eleonora Albertovna Kruger. She died in 1954.
In 1991, the place where the Imperial family and their servants were supposedly buried as found in the woods outside Yekaterinburg. It had actually been found almost ten years earlier, but had been kept hidden by the people who discovered it. They did not want the Communists, who still ruled Russia at that time, to know where the grave was. The grave only had nine bodies instead of 11. DNA and studies on their skeletons showed that they were the bodies of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, and three of the Grand Duchesses (Olga, Tatiana, and Maria). The other remains had different DNA. They were the bodies of the family's doctor (Yevgeny Botkin), valet (Alexei Trupp), cook (Ivan Kharitonov) and Alexandra's maid (Anna Demidova). Dr. William Maples decided that the Tsarevitch Alexei and Anastasia's bodies were missing. Russian scientists did not agree with this. They claimed that it was the body of Maria was missing, not Anastasia's. The Russians used a computer program to compare photos of Anastasia with the skulls from the grave. When some of the pieces of bone in the skulls were missing, they guessed how long or wide it was instead. American scientists thought this way of studying the bodies was wrong.
American scientists thought the missing body was Anastasia's. This was because none of the female skeletons showed signs that it was not fully grown yet. The remains of the Imperial Family were buried in 1998. At that time, a body that measured about 5 feet, 7 inches (170 cm) was buried as the body of Anastasia. Photographs of her standing next to her sisters six months before she died show that Anastasia was a few inches shorter than all of them.
The "Yurovsky Note" showed that two of the bodies were taken from the main grave and burned secretly to hide the burials of the Imperial family. However, people could not find the place where the bodies were burnt for many years. However, on 23 August 2007, a Russian archaeologist declared that he had found two burned skeletons near Yekaterinburg, at a place which seemed to match what was described in Yurovsky's writings. The archaeologists said that the bones were from a boy who was about 10 to 13, and a young woman who was between 18 and 23 years old. Anastasia was 17 years and one month old when she was killed; Maria was 19 years, one month old, and Alexei was just two weeks before his fourteenth birthday. Anastasia's older sisters, Olga and Tatiana, were 22 and 23 when they died. They used metal detectors to find the bones.
Many international laboratories such as the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory and Medical University of Innsbruck did DNA tests. They proved that the remains were from the body of Tsarevich Alexei and one of his sister. They agreed that everyone in the family, including Anastasia, died in 1918. All the parents and children has his or her own special DNA.
In 2000, Anastasia and her family were canonized as passion bearers by the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1981, they had already been canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad as holy martyrs. The bodies of Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, and three of their daughters were buried in the St. Catherine Chapel at St. Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg on 17 July 1998. This was 80 years after they had been murdered.
The stories of how Anastasia might have escaped became the subject of theatrical and television movies. The earliest, made in 1928, was called "Clothes Make the Woman". The story was about a woman who acts the character of Anastasia in a Hollywood movie, and is later recognized by the Russian soldier who saved her.