JessicaNHunt

Welcome!

Hello, JessicaNHunt, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing.

Handouts
Choosing an article to edit Editing an article • Add images to articles Citing sources on Wikipedia
Additional Resources
You can find answers to many student questions on our Q&A site, ask.wikiedu.org

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:45, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Notes

The skeletal remains bore evidence of bullet and stab wounds. It is impossible to say with certainty how the fatal blows were inflicted in each case, since if a bullet passes through soft tissue it may kill its victim but leave no trace on the skeleton, while a bullet which damages bone might not be fatal. The ‘Ekaterinburg remains’ were far from complete skeletons since several rib-bones were missing, making it even harder to determine the precise cause of death. That said, the bones did produce some evidence of how the Romanovs and their servants died. ‘Skeleton No. 4’, for example,showed multiple gunshot wounds to the chest: according to eyewitnesses most of the executioners fired first directly at the ex-Tsar. The bodies of the other three men – Dr Botkin, the valet and the chef – also show multiple gunshot wounds. Does this indicate that the executioners wear squeamish about shooting the women and preferred to direct their firetowards the male victims? Or perhaps that the three men, who were standing near the former Tsar, received some of the bullets intended for him? The Skulls showed that two of the three daughters were definitely shot in the head. This tallies with the historical accounts which describe how two of the girls, found crouching against a wall when the shooting stopped, were executed at point-blank range with bullets to the temple. Finally, the facial bones of most of the skeletons had suffered extensive damage to the area between eye-sockets and jaw, damage caused by blows from ‘massive, blunt, hard objects with a relatively small surface area’, a fair description of a rifle butt. Furthermore, all the bodies bore signs of other trauma, possibly caused by rough handling post-mortem.

Around midnight the commandant had the doctor wake up the royal family. They came down the stairs around two in the morning.