Farming of eastern oysters (Crassostrea virginica ) is an important industry for meeting consumer demand for shellfish. Unfortunately slow growth and disease related mortality have been a challenge for growers. In response, various selectively bred lines of oysters have been created for farmers. Unfortunately these lines do not perform as well in diverse locations due to genotype by environment interactions. Selective breeding on native New England oysters has been proposed as an alternative for farmers in this region. The goal of this project is to characterize the potential wild populations of oysters for a breeding program based on genetics and performance in New England. Oysters from two wild populations in Rhode Island (GH and NR), one population in Connecticut (CT) and one population in Massachusetts (MV) and two commonly used commercial lines (CL1 and CL2) were collected, genotyped and spawned. The genotypes of the broodstock were used to evaluate genetic diversity and genetic differentiation between populations. The progeny of these oysters were grown at a site in Rhode Island over a 15 month growing period. Growth and survival were measured (55 oysters x 3 bags per stock) from July 2021 to October 2022 and then processed for disease testing and genotyping. To investigate the impact of grow-out sites on stock performance, lineages CL1, CL2, MV and GH were grown at two additional sites in Rhode Island from July 2022 to October 2023. For the stocks grown during the 2021-2022 growing period we saw significant differences in percent mortality ranging from 7.9% for CT to 81.9% for NR. These stocks also had significantly different harvest sizes with an average oyster size of 48 mm (SD=8) for NR and an average oyster size of 79 mm (SD=13) for CL2. Disease intensity also varied between lines with an average dermo intensity of 1.5 for CL2 and an average dermo intensity of 3.9 for CL1. At all sites and for both growing periods, MV had smaller size while the commercial lines grew much larger. In terms of survival however, there were differences between lines relative to one another with GH having relatively high survival at two of the sites and a relatively low survival at one site. For the genotyped broodstock (2021 year class), pairwise Fst values ranged from 0.007 to 0.048 while Fis values ranged from -0.036 to 0.142. This shows that wild lineages are affected by genotype by environment interactions that affect their performance. This suggests that the incorporation of multiple wild populations will be needed for establishing a breeding program. However, because of low pairwise Fst between populations it is not necessary to include all of them.