Diana, To contribute to your rant, this is why it is critical that all our surname project participants be strongly encouraged to upload all their YDNA results to YSearch and YBase, and to set their personal pages to display matches against the entire company databases not just their surname project. Doing so greatly aids those of trying to get through NPEs or looking for info on other ancestral lines. I regularly check YSearch to see if some one on one of my other ancestral lines has tested, and I have found one by doing so. Admins also have to get themselves out of their mindset that it is "their" data. It's not. It's the participants and the participant should be the one who decides who gets to see it our not. Admins who behave otherwise do themselves and their participants a great disservice. But then again Admins who are overly controlling of their participants YDNA are likely not on this list because that would require being open minded. :-) David. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Diana Gale Matthiesen Sent: July 24, 2008 8:10 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Y-DNA-projects] sharing of results - rant warning Ah, now I understand. This touches on the issue of making project results public, something I have a very strong opinion about. I feel the same way about people who won't share DNA data as I do about people who won't share their genealogical research (and, for obvious reasons, they're often the same persons). I'm a retired scientist, and I've never seen a field of research where there is more "reinventing of the wheel" as there is in genealogy. The purpose of sharing your research is so that the next person can take up where you left off and move us all that much further. If everyone has to start at square one, none of us will advance beyond what one person can do in a lifetime. If we share, the "rising tide lifts all boats." The admonition for a researcher to "publish or perish" is serious. It means, if you aren't publishing, you must not be accomplishing anything, and if you're not accomplishing anything, you're not doing your job as a researcher. Or put another way, the last step in any research project is to publish the results. If you haven't shared your work by publishing, you haven't finished. And how many genealogists have held on to their work, literally with a death grip, and had it thrown away by their heirs? What a colossal waste. I wish genealogy could be infused with the ethic to publish (to share), the same way academic research is infused with that ethic. However, I realize it's not my place to preach philosophy here. What is my place is to complain about the harm being done to genealogists and genealogy by DNA projects being secretive. We have just one patrilineal and one matrilineal line. These are only two of many ancestral lines each of us have. To gain an appreciation of how many, I periodically remind myself by viewing this table: http://dgmweb.net/genealogy/Ancillary/OnE/NumberAncestors.shtml I want to prove all the lines in my pedigree, not just my patrilineal line, and I presume at least most of us share that goal. To accomplish this goal, we're going to need others to share their results with us, just as we are sharing our results with them. I frankly cannot fathom why anyone wants to keep their results secret, although the motive of one project is clear... I had one family association running a project that made me join the association ($20) to get a copy of the results from them. All I got was a table of 25-marker results and the name of the earliest ancestor. My line is R1b, so 25 markers is simply not enough. But there's no contact information for me to find out if the person has tested more markers or to urge them to do so if they haven't. If I want to continue to be sent results, I will have to continue with an annual $20 subscription. I simply can't afford to belong to all the family associations for all the surnames in my pedigree, and there aren't words to express how much I resent paying for information when I'm giving it away for free. If we all charged for information, none of us could afford to get anywhere! There's another project for one of the surnames in my pedigree where all I could get out of the project admin was the progenitor's haplogroup. I've still have no idea whom we match, whether my line has been tested, or whether we've "crossed the pond." Please forgive the rant, but I do *not* understand this mindset. I commend you for at least trying to help those you can on an individual basis. You are making me so glad there is no family association for my surname. Diana