Annie Amelia Scarr

[crisane]

Birth reg
Mary Ann Wallis, March  1/4 1881 registration district Cambridge vol 3b page 514. Mother's maiden name Scarr

Death
Mary Ann Wallis March 1/4 1881 Cambridge vol 3b page 337 age 0
   
This is the only one I can see at the moment.

[JenB]

GRO's attempt!

SEAN, ANNIE  AMELIA 
no mmn    
Q2 1864 CAMBRIDGE  Volume 03B  Page 492

Having spent some time unsuccessfully looking for the birth on the GRO site, I'd be fascinated to know you you managed to get this result 

[rosie99]

You can get it by putting in
Sc*  (Phonetically similar variations)
Annie
Amelia
1864

[JenB]

You can get it by putting in
Sc*  (Phonetically similar variations)
Annie
Amelia
1864

Well that shows how much attention I pay. When did they start allowing wildcards?

[rosie99]

I don't know Jen, I just tried it and it worked    First I tried Sca* and when that worked Sc*   

[Mabel Bagshawe]

I'd tried phonetical on Scar and Star with no luck then decided to try something a bit more random to push it into a wider range of  options so put in Sar!

[rosie99]

It looks as though the GRO index search is a lot more flexible than it used to be 

[cuffie81]

You can get it by putting in
Sc*  (Phonetically similar variations)
Annie
Amelia
1864

Well that shows how much attention I pay. When did they start allowing wildcards?

I don't believe the GRO have started supporting wildcards.

I think what you're seeing here is just a result of the algorithm the GRO are using for phonetic matching (Metaphone) and how they're using it. They're matching on any name where the Metaphone code is the same or has up to one character different.

For the names Sc, Sc* and Sca* the Metaphone code is SK. For the name Sean the Metaphone code is SN. As these are just one character different the GRO are treating this as a match.

Here's a useful page if you want to check what the Metaphone code is for a given name:
Metaphone Calculator for Genealogy Searches by Ancestor Search
http://www.searchforancestors.com/utility/metaphone.php


As for wildcard matching, they have built support for it but for some reason they've disabled it in the UI. It's quite trivial to enable it, and it does work, but it's almost certainly against their terms-of-use to do so.