Question

It appears that there is no longer an opportunity to reject a suggested match without comparing.

Comments

I would like that option to come back also.

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PLEASE! "MacDougall" is not "MacDowell". "Kelly" is not "Kelty", "Cornish" is not "Cornwell". SUCH a time waste.

Answer 1

Why would reject a suggested match without looking at it?

Comments

When it is clear that the last names at birth are not the same. Often, suggested matches have women whose married names match a last name at birth, but the LNAB do not match.

Another example would be when a suggested match was born and died in another country, such as Australia, but you know the person being matched never left Mississippi.

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And how do you know that if you don’t compare?

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On the list of possible matches many of them have years and/or locations shown.  If I have an ancestor born in 1900, I can eliminate one whose dates are 1700s without needing to compare.

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I can see that happening, however, in such a case I would look for a birth certificate as a source first. In my own tree, I have a person who's last name at birth is set up as their married name only because originally I didn't know their maiden name. To complicate further, her mother was married the times and so her lastname was recorded differently at different times depending on which "father" was around at the time. In addition,  there are times when the person was created by someone else who didn't know the birth surname so the profile will have the wrong name as it's ID. It's always a good idea to compare before deciding to merge or reject due to the number of possible "complications".

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In the case of not knowing a last name at birth, wouldn't you use "unknown", rather than the married name there?

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Wouldn't you set the date range for matching to exclude the possibility of large date discrepancies? Even thirty years would avoid that.

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I did that when I was new to wikitree and have learned better ways since then. The point was that just because some data doesn't match at first glance  doesn't make it a different person. That's why it's important to look at sources and do a comparison. It helps reduce/mitigate the effects of human error (like in this example from my tree).