Smith is the author of Autobiography of HIH Anastasia Nicholaevna of Russia (1963), in which she recounts "her" life in the Russian Imperial Family up to the time when Bolsheviks murdered them at Ekaterinburg, and "she escaped" the massacre.

Although after World War II there were at least ten claimants to the identity of Grand Duchess Anastasia, only Anna Anderson and Eugenia Smith achieved more than a small circle of believers.

[1] In her published autobiography, Smith provided a lengthy but unverifiable explanation of how she survived the execution of the family of Tsar Nicholas II at Ekaterinburg on July 17, 1918, and subsequently escaped to the west.

The long journey, undertaken by train and on foot, took Smith and her rescuers through the towns of Ufa, Bugulma, Simbirsk and Kursk before reaching Serbia, where they were accommodated in the home of a local man and his wife.

In 1963, however, an American journalist tracked down Mr. Smetisko in Yugoslavia and reported: "The man was found living in a poor hut with his wife; he said he'd never known anybody named Eugenia, or anybody from Chicago, or had ever been married before.

[6] Smith evidently returned to Europe later that decade, as another passenger manifest reveals that Eugenia Smetisko, now aged 30, arrived in New York again on September 23, 1929, sailing from Le Havre aboard the S. S. De Grasse.

[7] During her early years in Illinois, Smith met John Adams Chapman, a prominent Chicago businessman, who accepted her claim to be the Tsar's daughter.

During this time, Smith was also a frequent guest of Mrs. Wells' older sister, Miss Edith Kohlstaat, who still lived in the vast house that her parents had built at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, in the early 1900s.

Smith's new hostess remained a firm believer in her claim to be the Tsar's daughter, and celebrated her birthday each year on Grand Duchess Anastasia's actual birthdate of June 18.

Keen to arrange a meeting, the princess invited Smith to lunch on no fewer than three occasions; in each case, however, the claimant declined on the grounds that she was too nervous.

[3] In the late 1950s, Smith was introduced to writer and local historian Edward Arpee (1899–1979), author of such books as The History of Lake Forrest Academy (1944) and From Frigates to Flat-tops (1953), with whom she planned to collaborate on her memoirs.

Arpee later recalled that he prepared a manuscript about the survival of Grand Duchess Anastasia "working from material supplied by Mrs. Smith in odds and ends, and in innumerable interviews".

[2] Whilst living at Lake Geneva, Smith (still using the name Eugenia Smetisko) gained prominence as a lecturer at various women's clubs in the Chicago area.

Prior to publication, excerpts were printed by Life magazine, along with articles detailing the mixed results of the lie detector tests, handwriting analysis and an anthropologist's comparison of Smith's facial features with photographs of the actual Grand Duchess.

[4] There were also comments from two people who had known the Grand Duchess in childhood: Princess Nina Chavchavadze and Gleb Botkin's sister, Tatiana Melnik, both of whom rejected Smith's claims.

[11] In December 1963, Speller & Sons were contacted by Michael Goleniewski, a former Polish army officer who, for some years, had claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia's brother, the Tsarevich Alexei.

[13] During that time, she founded the St Nicholas House Foundation, a non-profit organization to establish a museum for Russian art and history in the United States.

Lark d'Helen, who conducted her memorial service at the Newport Congregational Church, said of her: "Eugenia was a woman of character determined, tenacious, imperial even to the end".