Manual (A)

Mike Sandham's research log ("List 1"), imported 16 Sep 2026, credited to The South Africa War Graves Project unless his entry says otherwise: gives Age 26 against this record's 39. This record has no date of birth, so there is nothing to adjudicate with. Flagged, not changed.
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".
Col (rt) Graham du Toit Last Post 28 Sep 2026: "81512030SP Rifleman Joao Manual from 32 Battalion accidentally drowned while stationed at Buffalo Base. He was 26." Service number, date and cause (drowning) agree exactly; this is the only record holding 81512030SP.
- NAME CONFLICT, NOT CHANGED: this record holds "Thembisile Manual"; Graham gives "Joao Manual".
- AGE CONFLICT, NOT CHANGED: this record holds 39, Graham gives 26.
- UNIT, NOT CHANGED: this record has no Unit stored (Corps only, South African Infantry Corps); Graham gives 32 Battalion, which cannot be confirmed against Corps alone given the name/age conflict above.
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 'Thembisile', Age 39 and Unit '' were forward-filled from PersonNumber 31568 down a contiguous run of 4 records -- this record's own LastName ('Manual'), Initials ('A'), ServiceNo ('81512030SP') and DateDeath ('1981-09-28') 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.