Nicholas II of Russia - Identification

Identification

In 1979, the bodies of Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, four of their daughters, and those of four non-family members killed with them, were discovered near Sverdlovsk by amateur archaeologist Alexander Avdonin. In January 1998, the remains excavated from underneath the dirt road near Yekaterinburg were officially identified as those of Nicholas II and his family (excluding one of the sisters, and Alexei). The identifications by separate Russian, British and American scientists using DNA analysis concur and were found to be conclusive. After the testing, the remains were finally interred at St. Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg on 17 July 1998, eighty years after they were executed.

In July 2007, 46-year-old builder Sergei Pogorelov (part of a team from an amateur history group who spent free summer weekends looking for the lost Romanovs) said that after stumbling on a small burned area of ground covered with nettles near Yekaterinburg he had discovered bones that belonged to "a boy and a young woman roughly the ages of Nicholas’ 13-year-old hemophiliac son, Alexei, and a daughter whose remains also never have been found."

On 23 August 2007, acting on standard procedures, prosecutors reopened the investigation surrounding the deaths of the Imperial Family.

On 30 April 2008, DNA tests performed by a US laboratory proved that bone fragments exhumed in the Ural Mountains belonged to two children of Nicholas II, son Alexei (b. 1904) and daughter Maria (b. 1899), according to Russian news agencies. That same day it was announced by Russian authorities that the remains of the entire family had been identified.

On 1 October 2008, Russia's Supreme Court ruled that Nicholas II and his family were victims of political repression and should be rehabilitated. In March 2009, results of the DNA testing were published, confirming that the two bodies discovered in 2007 were those of Alexei and his sister Maria.

Nicholas belonged to the paternal haplogroup R1b; based upon Y-STR DNA test results on his remains, which have also been validated with results from a living relative. The Tsar belonged to the maternal haplogroup T based upon mitochondrial DNA mutations: 16126C, 16169Y, 16294T, 16296T, 73G, 263G, and 315.1C.