Ancestry and the NRS: when the corporate genealogy world turns ugly

Summary

In almost twenty years working as a genealogist, I don't think I have ever been as angry as I was yesterday when I read about Ancestry's latest endeavour.In a quite frankly appalling development, Ancestry (www.ancestry.co.uk) is taking the National Records of Scotland (www.nrscotland.gov.uk) to court in a bid to try to gain access to many of the records available on ScotlandsPeople (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk). The story is at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy50gn5353zo.Ancestry is doing this because the NRS has refused to enter into a financial agreement with the records platform, stating that it would cost the archive £3.7 million a year in lost revenue, I imagine because the need for the ScotlandsPeople platform would collapse. The Information Commissioner's Office actually sided with the NRS, but Ancestry has challenged this with a body I have never heard of based in London, called the General Regulatory Chamber. It's reported that the Tribunal has ruled that the NRS should be able to make the records available, but has also noted that it hasn't got the legal authority to compel it to do so**. So there will now be a separate hearing.In the past, Ancestry has entered into many agreements with the National Archives (TNA) in England to digitise and host records, often with exclusivity periods, for example with past census releases. But those were entered into as the result of a decision by that archive to seek commercial involvement (TNA also regularly partners with TheGenealogist and FindmyPast).The NRS holds its records in trust for me and the people of Scotland. If I was to challenge the NRS that it was not providing access to Crown copyright records that I felt it should open up, there would perhaps be a moral case to support the challenge, with my being a Scottish based taxpayer. And indeed, there is a mechanism to attempt to do so, the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act, which I know various colleagues have attempted to use from time to time. But Ance...