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There are a several acceptable spellings for the names of the Romanov family because the Russian language uses a Cyrillic alphabet and because you have to transliterate them into English using the English alphabet, there's no one set way to spell them. Basically, you have to spell the names (goes for words, too) as they sound in Russian using English letters because there are no direct equivalents of Cyrillic letters in English (this is hard for me to explain, so I'm hoping that you can follow me somewhat).

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I'm not totally sure on this, but I believe there are a couple of standardised transcription systems for Romanising Russian (basically, writing Russian using the English alphabet).

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Basically, no matter how the Romanovs names are spelled, they aren't necessarily wrong.

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Traditional English equivalents are Nicholas, Alexandra, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, Alexis.

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A more standard equivalent (English transliterations that stay true to the Russian forms) are Nikolai (can also be Nikolay), Aleksandra, Olga, Tatiyana (Tatiana, Tatyana), Mariya (Maria), Anastasiya (Anastasia), Aleksei (Aleksey).

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I hope this made an iota of sense. :)

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This message was edited 5/22/2006, 2:19 PM