I'm thinking of a field that doesn't even have to appear on the profile. When I see Ancestry trees in two huge groups, one that uses a birth year of 1700 and one that uses 1705, I instantly get that feeling of dread that there will forever be a burden of locating new duplicates and merging them. If there was a way to enter additional common birth year estimates, just for the purpose of making the profile show up in searches, I'd think it would reduce a lot of the merging and redirecting we have to do, especially in pre-1700 profiles (which are often project managed, making the process even more onerous). And if one creates a profile that doesn't appear a lot online, so you are creating a birth year estimate for the first time really, and you feel your guess could be off by as much as 10 years, you could use additional birth year estimates to create non-overlapping 5-year windows to cover that 20-year span.
I also wonder about redirected profiles. They essential become just a pointer to the new profile, right? Is there a way to keep the old birth year estimate associated with that pointer, so the redirected profile ID would show up in a search? That could be another way to accomplish the same goal.
