De Graaff was the daughter of Lena Kroon and Leendert Johannes Hemmes, a man who claimed to be able to use his psychic powers to diagnose sickness from the urine of people with illnesses.
Philippe Vachot, a doctor and "holy man" at the Imperial court from Lyon, France, supposedly arranged for the baby to go to Hemmes.
Accordingly, when the fifth girl, later to become de Graaff, was supposedly born on September 1, 1903, Vachot had motive to secrete the child away and claim that the Tsarina had not in fact been pregnant.
[citation needed] In 1905, several months after the August 1904 birth of Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich of Russia, Vachot returned to France a rich man, having been generously compensated by the Romanovs.
Lovell reported in his book "Anastasia: The Lost Princess" (St. Martin's Press, 1991) that the pre-revolutionary rubles shown to him by van Weelden had apparently never been circulated; they were new, still crisp and in numerically sequential order.