[dbatten]

Is it possible that Ancestry's secret sauce was simply threatening legal action?

A couple of years ago, I was trying to get some public records from the University of North Carolina. I submitted a request by email, as their website said I could. They responded a week later and said they needed a letter. I sent a letter. They responded to the letter and said that the letter needed to include my cell phone number and email address to process the request. (There was no mention of this before. Records could have easily been mailed to me at my address, and they already had my email address from the aforementioned email incident.) So, I provided the info. I heard nothing for months. I asked for a status update. They said the request was "delayed." I heard nothing for months. I followed up, told them they were in violation of North Carolina state law, and that if they weren't going to provide the records, I'd pursue legal action. Boom, got the records within a couple of days. Like magic.

Also, during my years as a state employee, I noticed that one of the few things that could get the lumbering bureaucracy moving (as an entity, there were plenty of hard-working well-meaning employees) was a threat of a lawsuit or a fine handed down by the feds. The institutional terror around that sort of thing was almost comical at times.