The Irish unit, Ancestry Ireland, wanted access to records spanning the 12th to 16th centuries, including prison and census records, wills and valuation rolls.
Ancestry.com says it generates revenue of about $1bn (€850m) a year.
In 2024, the Irish unit generated revenue of $222m and a pre-tax profit of $62.8m.
It received a dividend of $905.5m from a related company that year, and saw its administrative costs soar to $1.03bn from $306.5m. That surge in expenses was due to increased royalty payments made to its parent firm.
The Irish division told a tribunal in Scotland that it has been trying, to no avail, for the last 20 years to sign a commercial deal with National Records of Scotland (NRS) for access to the records, which span a massive 80 terabytes of data.
Ancestry.com said it holds 60 billion records online
Over the last couple of decades, the NRS has been digitising its records with assistance from the Genealogical Society of Utah.
Ancestry.com said that it holds 60 billion records online and that it has more than 25 million people registered in what it describes as the world’s largest consumer DNA network.
In 2022, Ancestry wrote to NRS requesting that it be permitted to reuse the data it sought on a worldwide, royalty-free and perpetual basis so that it could be commercially exploited.
Later that year, NRS refused the request. In doing so, Ancestry complained that NRS had failed to comply with legislation called the Re-Use of Public Sector Information (RPSI) regulations.
NRS made a number of arguments, including that Ancestry’s proposed reuse of the information was not “reuse” of the information within the meaning of regulations.
Ancestry then complained to the Information Commissioner in Scotland, and the NRS stood by its decision not to accede to Ancestry’s request.
The commissioner ultimately agreed with the decision, which was then appealed to a tribunal, claiming the NRS decision was unlawful. But the tribunal has now largely sided with NRS.
“NRS’s exercise of its discretion to refuse Ancestry’s request is not in breach of any requirement of RPSI,” it said in a ruling.