Charlie: I'm not sure I can answer all aspects of your question but I can perhaps clarify a few. Ultimately you, the person who supplied the sample to be tested, have control over the results that are obtained and how they will, or will not, be publicized. When you receive your test kit from Family Tree DNA it is accompanied by a waiver form which you must sign if you wish to have your results compared with others. If you do not sign the waiver all you will get are your own results and no-one else will have access to them. I think this makes your results effectively worthless to both yourself and the community because the power of the method is in comparing the results obtained from many different donors. For this reason, many surname DNA studies, including our study, require participants to essentially sign the waiver as a condition of participation. As part of our participation agreement (http://www.hamiltongensociety.org/documents/hngs_dna_app.pdf) you sign that you agree to the following: "I agree to release my project code number, ancestor's name, ancestor's chronology, ancestor's location, and DNA markers for publication on the HAMILTON/HAMBLETON DNA Project web pages." We will not associate your results with you as a person unless you give explicit permission for us to do so. What we will do, and by signing the above you agree to, is associate your results with your earliest known ancestor that you supplied on your pedigree chart. These are the procedures that many surname DNA studies are now applying (see, for example, http://www.blairgenealogy.com/dna/) and for genealogy purposes this makes sense. It makes the DNA marker results available to the public but it associates them with an ancestor long dead and not with any living person. Coming back to Family Tree DNA, if you sign their waiver you will be able to search their own database and some other published databases that they have to see if your marker values match any others. If there are matches in their own database you will be able to send an email to the contact person for the match. However, Family Tree DNA will not directly share your results with other groups without your explicit permission. They are in the business of analyzing DNA; what is done with the results is up to you the donor and the group you are associated with. Consequently, I do not think there is any direct interchange of information between Family Tree DNA and other DNA labs. Having said that, however, there are many avenues where the results are becoming available to the community. As indicated above many results are published on the surname web pages. Also, several web sites are being set up as repositories of DNA data. Of particular interest to those of us of Scottish descent is a repository of Scot DNA data that John Hansen (jahansen@qwest.net) has organized. I imagine that eventually our Hamilton data will be linked to his site. To make a long story short: you are in charge of what is done with your results not the labs doing the analysis; how they are publicized is up to you and your group; most of the results in one form or another are becoming available for analysis and comparison. Gordon Hamilton >Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 11:42:58 -0500 >From: "Charlie Hamilton" <chamilton6@triad.rr.com> >To: HAMILTON-L@rootsweb.com >Message-ID: <002b01c2c623$263137f0$3412a318@charlie> >Subject: RE: [HAM] Hamilton DNA Project >Content-Type: text/plain; > charset="us-ascii" >Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit > >Gordon, >Question: since there are several DNA labs, is there an interchange of >information between them? Or, how would one DNA sample be known among others >who were tested? Or, how would one compare his DBA results with results from >other labs/ >Thanx, Charlie Hamilton