Ref SANDF 1998 RoH
26 Aug 2026: Corps from SAWGP Regiment South African Infantry Corps; Unit leftover "2 South African Infantry Battalion" → 3 South African Infantry Battalion (SAWGP Unit).
4 Sep 2026: Regiment leftover "SA Army" cleared -- that's the service branch (Army, as distinct from Navy/Air Force), not a specific regiment; the actual unit ("3 South African Infantry Battalion") is already captured in Unit. Per John's decision, the 52 records with no better Unit info were left as-is.
25 Sep 2026, Unit2 service-branch sweep: the stored Secondary Unit "Army" was CLEARED as a duplicate. It was not a sub-unit, it was a service-branch word repeating what the Branch column already says. Secondary Unit is for sub-units -- a company, a squadron, a commando -- and this record's branch of service is unchanged at "Army".
Database-wide FirstName/Age/Unit contamination sweep, 28 Sep 2026 (John's hypothesis, tested and confirmed on 3 sample groups before running at scale): FirstName 'Michael Gerrard', Age 18 and Unit '' were forward-filled from PersonNumber 31300 down a contiguous run of 2 records -- this record's own LastName ('Lenda'), Initials ('N'), ServiceNo ('80821846') and DateDeath ('1998-11-17') are all genuinely distinct from every other record in the run, confirming a different real person whose FirstName/Age/Unit were simply never captured (source pattern consistent with a SAPS memorial table using rowspan for Name/Age/Province, mis-copied by the scraper onto every row). FirstName, Age and Unit CLEARED; no replacement guessed. CauseDeath NOT touched -- it follows its own, narrower sub-block boundaries within this run and carries real distinguishing information.
CORRECTION, 28 Sep 2026: the earlier note on this record wrongly described Unit as forward-filled/contaminated alongside FirstName and Age. On review, Unit values proved to be common, genuinely correct data shared by many unrelated real people throughout this dataset (e.g. 'Western Cape' alone appears on 195 scattered, unrelated records with 111 distinct surnames) -- Unit was NOT part of this contamination and has been RESTORED from the pre-sweep backup. FirstName and Age remain correctly cleared -- both were 100% correlated across every contaminated run and independently confirmed absent on SAWGP's own record for spot-checked samples.
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