Because nothing requires them to explain what happened.

With a few notable exceptions, public records statutes only provide a right of access to extant records. They do not require agencies to answer questions or provide information.

That's just the way it is.

Reclaim the Records:

I read all of the publicly available court filings in your lawsuit. I'll reserve my comments on its merits for now and will simply recommend that you focus your PR efforts on the actual violations you are alleging in your lawsuit, and not on the possibility that Ancenstry.com was treated favorably vis-à-vis Reclaim the Records.

To be brutally honest, your focus on the latter sounds like whiney sour grapes at this stage, as you have zero solid evidence indicating that anything nefarious happened.

I completely understand the 'hot news' value of some public records. (I earn my living from it.) I also understand your suspicions about what happened as well as your interest in obtaining all records relating to the Ancenstry.com records request and its processing.

But until you have those records, your only potentially legitimate complaint is that they have not fulfilled their obligations under the FOIL. That's it.

Focus on that, otherwise you are going to see this thread repeating itself.

(For examples of what I mean, your website's page linked to in this very post literally highlights that Ancestry.com "received their copies of the records first" and that Ancestry.com "cut-and-pasted" "the exact words" of your organization's FOIL request. Unless you are suing Ancestry.com for copyright infringement, come on. People "steal" my request language all the time. It's only significant if something funky happened regarding preferential access.)

Good luck.