More about Suggested Records

We've had some questions about Ancestry's Suggested Records, so I will try to clarify my previous post.

We would like you to pretend that the Suggested Records don't even exist. Even if you do a separate search, based on that information, you are still using the Suggested Records and adding bias to the sample.

That said, Chis will be adding a check box (or something similar) to the screens to indicate that you've used the Suggested Records to find a census decade or death information. The reason for this box will be so that users can DROP that data from the sample (so that they won't have to account for the bias). So we really don't want you to use the Suggested Records, because we don't want to increase the likelihood that data won't be used.

Someone mentioned that occasionally people will use the Suggested Records when they are adding the hyperlink for previously entered data into the screens. This is fine, because this information was already found, and you're not using the Suggested Records to find new or additional data. In this case, you would NOT mark the check box (when we get it) indicating that you used the Suggested Records.

I hope I haven't further muddied the waters. If you ignore the Suggested Records box, you'll be just fine. Let me know if you have questions.