Esekia Shangala (J)

Unit was incorrectly set to "32 (Buffalo) Battalion" (a SADF unit not formed until 1975) — impossible for this pre-1975 death. Found and cleared 27 Aug 2026 while investigating a family correction email about PersonNumber 31346 (Lipschild), which had the same wrong Unit; a further check found 22 other pre-1975 records sharing it. Root cause not identified (no source in this record names a unit at all beyond the generic Unit2 arm-of-service tag, or the Regiment already on file) — Unit left blank rather than guessed. | Locality was wrongly set to "Gauteng" -- corrected 28 Aug 2026 (second pass, this time verified against Cemetery rather than AddInfo text, after the first AddInfo-based pass was found to be unreliable and reverted). This person's own Cemetery is unambiguously outside South Africa; several other people at the same cemetery already correctly show a blank Locality. Cleared rather than guessed at a specific region.
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 'Johnnie', Age 22 and Unit '' were forward-filled from PersonNumber 30266 down a contiguous run of 2 records -- this record's own LastName ('Esekia Shangala'), Initials ('J'), ServiceNo ('EA/18124988') and DateDeath ('1954-12-25') 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.