We have always found it amazing that the children willingly and jokingly posed for pictures when they had their heads shaved in 1917! The oddity, and also the blessing, is that getting the measles and having their heads shaved has proved most helpful 80 years later when trying to figure out who matches which skull. The following photographs on this page can be viewed as HIGHLY offensive.. we will be the first to admit that we're no experts.. just driven by curiousity and a desire to discover the truth. We created overlays of Maria and Tatiana's faces with one of the skulls belonging to the remains in question. These pictures were certainly not fun to do, yet curiosity got the better of us. We wanted to see who this skull, belonging to the sixth set of remains, best sizes up to.. but last thing we want to do is upset anyone. So please proceed with the warning that this is not for people that may be weak stomached.
~Lishka~

 

 

The photo of the skull on the left comes from Peter Kurth's TSAR: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra. It is cropped from a picture of the three female Romanov skulls on page 217. On the far left of the picture is the skull which belonged to the Empress Alexandra. On the far right is the skull of Grand Duchess Olga Nicolaievna. The middle skull is our skull in question. It is not so easy to detect in this picture, but when they first saw this skull the face was badly battered. The Russians had the task of piecing the facial bones back together.

 

 

The Russians had labored manfully over Body No. 6, attempting to restore its facial bones with generous dollops of glue, stretched across wide gaps. They had been forced to estimate over and over again, while reassembling these fragments, almost none of which were touching each other in the reconstruction.
~Dr. William Maples~

 Maples said it was only the facial portions of the skull that was reconstructed. The upper cranial portion was already in tact, as well as the jaw. We did try to limit our comparisons to the portions that seemed the most originally together. After we studied the shape of Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia's heads, and compared their proportions with that of No. 6. Maria shared the most similar points of identification with this skull.

 

• the cranial hill & slope of the forehead

  The skull matched beautifully with Maria's average head shape. They both shared the same proportions on the cranial hill (from the "north pole" to the forehead).

• the cheekbones

  The large eye orbits pushes the cheekbone level low, a description that best fits Maria. Both Tatiana and Anastasia share their mother's high cheekbone trait.

• the bridge between the eye orbits

  Automatically Tatiana is excluded because the bridge that runs over the top of the nose between the eyes was not wide enough. Anastasia gave me as definite an answer as Tatiana did.. the bridge between her eye orbits was too narrow to match with this skull.

• the mandibular slope (the lower jaw line)

  When overlaying Maria's face with the skull the jaw-lines ran together smoothly.

• the clef on the chin

  Out of the girls we noticed Maria was the one who had the most distinctive chin.. the rest of the girls didn't have as much of a clef.

• the upper left frontal view of the forehead

  The distinctive "bump" on the upper left forehead was shared in both Maria and No. 6, yet the other girls did not show this same pattern.