I'm not quite sure I understand the two posts suggesting improvements in DNA testing and asking about the cost of reports. Forgive me if I am wrong, but the questions may stem from a misunderstanding of how DNA testing works and what can be done now. First of all, genealogical DNA testing is done by private for-profit companies. Getting them to share results is like getting General Motors and Ford to use interchangeable parts because it would make it easier for consumers to get repairs. Or maybe like getting different prescription drug companies to share the formula for their patented drugs. Cost of reports? Why can't you just print your report out and send it to as many people as you want? On FTDNA, our sponsor, you have a personal page with your results. You could print that page, or cut and paste the results to a word processing program (like Microsoft Word) and print as many as you want. Just go to familytreeDNA.com, put in the name of the study (Pace) and your kit number. Joe Anderson has given a good explanation of why it wouldn't help for different lines to share results. You get your DNA from all of your ancestors, but for most types of DNA, there's no way of telling which ancestor. Let's say you have blue eyes and blond hair. You may be able to guess which side of the family your blue eyes and blond hair came from, but only for the generations that you know. Further back, they could come from anywhere. You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, and that keeps doubling so that ten generations back you have 1024 ancestors. Which one passed the blond hair and blue eyes genes to you? Impossible to tell. However, as Joe has explained, two kinds of DNA can be traced--yDNA using the Y chromosome because it passes only male to male, and mtDNA, mitrochondrial DNA (which for clarity I call maternal DNA) passes from a mother to all of her children but only the females pass it on. I'll use myself as an example. My mother was a Pace; my father a Johnson. I have had my DNA tested on the Johnson study on FTDNA, but that would have no relationship at all to my Pace ancestry, so what good would sharing the results do? I have a good paper trail back to John of Middlesex but no way to prove it out by DNA as my mother's Pace line has died out. She had one brother and he is deceased, and there are no other close male relatives. So the best I can do is to ASSUME my paper records are accurate and ASSUME the extremely consistent results on that line would be what my uncle would get if the tested. I will never be able to validate that assumption with DNA. If I tested my maternal DNA, that would go back up my mother's female line. My mother was Ena Pace. Her mother was Mary nee Bottom; Mary's mother was a Burnside, and that's as far as I know. If I found someone else whose maternal line went to Burnside, we could both test to see if we have a common female ancestor. But as you can see, the mtDNA test is less useful in genealogy because the name changes with marriage. Incidentally--searching the Internet for the Bottom surname was interesting. I think I hit every pornography site in existence. I do have another idea. Joe has been having problems getting his results from another company to be used by FTDNA. If the markers that they use are the same, and if Joe would send me the results from the other company and I could match them up, I could include them on the Results page regardless of whether the companies would exchange data or not. The Pace DNA pages are on our own server, not controlled in any way by FTDNA. Can you do that, Joe? Roy Johnson DNA coordinator