Does a primary or archival source confirm the Amicable Society split its fixed annual dividend fund among claimants proportional to shares held, rather than equally per claim?

claim-amicable-society-1706-fixed-dividend-fund-divided-equally-per-death establishes, directly from the Society's own 1706 founding pamphlet, that the annual dividend fund was fixed and pre-set (£2,000 the first year, at least £3,000 every year after) rather than calculated per claim. What it does not establish from the primary text is how that fund was divided among the year's claimants: the proportional-to-shares rule ("split amongst heirs of deceased members in proportion to the shares those members owned") comes only from Tontine Coffee-House, a secondary source citing Cornelius Walford (1885) and Geoffrey Clark (1999) — the pamphlet's own clause on this point ("in the following Proportion, viz. ...") is the most OCR-degraded passage read this session and could not be independently confirmed.

Why it matters. This is the specific technical-mechanism half of the claim, and the sourcing floor (00-meta/specs/sources.md) puts mechanism claims at Tier 1–2. Tier 2 alone clears the floor, but the note currently rests on a single secondary account read for the first time this session, with no cross-check against the primary or against the scholarship that secondary account itself cites.

What would resolve it.

• A clean (non-OCR, or manually re-transcribed) reading of the 1706 pamphlet's dividend-distribution clause — the archive.org PDF endpoint returned HTTP 500 this session; a retry or a page-image read would settle the exact wording.
• Cornelius Walford, "History of Life Assurance in the United Kingdom," Journal of the Institute of Actuaries, vol. 25 (1885) — on JSTOR (stable/41135809), not yet fetched.
• Geoffrey Clark, Betting on Lives: The Culture of Life Insurance in England, 1695–1775 (Manchester University Press, 1999) — named as Tontine Coffee-House's other underlying source, not yet directly read.
• M. E. Ogborn, Equitable Assurances (1962) — a plausible independent primary-adjacent source for the same institutional mechanics.

Until then, the note keeps its [unverified-mechanism] flag and stays seedling.

Progress log, 2026-07-24 (dedicated verification session): all four named leads were chased and none closed the question. A second, independently-fetched extraction of the pamphlet's dividend clause converges on the same illegible "in the following Proportion" gap as the first attempt. Walford's essay is now freely accessible (claim-walford-1885-essay-freely-hosted-installment-predates-amicable-society-1706) but its located installment predates the Amicable Society's 1706 founding — the continuation installment that would plausibly reach it remains unlocated. Clark's Betting on Lives and Ogborn's Equitable Assurances were not found in accessible full text online. A secondary finding sharpened the stakes rather than resolving them: the Tontine Coffee-House sentence carrying the shares-proportional claim has no inline citation of its own (claim-tontine-coffee-house-dividend-proportional-claim-has-no-citation). Capstone negative finding recorded at claim-premature-negative-finding-amicable-dividend-was-an-unlocated-installment. Remains open — this is a valid non-outcome, not a resolution. Next-best leads: a library/ILL read of Clark or Ogborn, or locating Walford's continuation installment (candidate: JSTOR stable/41135846, unverified, HTTP 403 on this session's attempt).

ANSWERED 2026-07-25. The last of those next-best leads was the right one, and it needed no library access at all. Walford's continuation installment is Journal of the Institute of Actuaries vol. 25, pp. 207–216, freely hosted by the Institute at actuaries.org.uk/system/files/documents/pdf/0207-0216.pdf — the same host and the same filename pattern as the first installment already in hand, one page range further on. JSTOR was never the only route.

The answer is no, and the reverse. No primary confirms the shares-proportional rule because Walford refutes it: "This depended entirely upon the number of deaths during the year, the sum appropriated for annual division being equally divided by the number of deaths." The fixed fund was divided equally per death-claim, with each member's payout depending on how many others died that year — Walford's "species of Mortuary Tontine." His worked figures check exactly (£4,000 ÷ 96 deaths = £41 13s 4d; £8,000 ÷ 87 = £91 19s 0¾d). The shares-proportional reading appears to trace to the word "share," which Walford uses throughout to mean a share of the divided death-fund, not an equity holding.

Recorded at claim-amicable-society-1706-fixed-dividend-fund-divided-equally-per-death (Tier 1, mechanism now verified-verbatim). The 2026-07-24 negative finding is superseded by claim-premature-negative-finding-amicable-dividend-was-an-unlocated-installment, which keeps the methodological lesson: a serialized source was treated as a single document, and every check the failed session ran was a check on access when access was never the binding constraint. Two of the four original leads (Clark 1999, Ogborn 1962) remain unread and are now unnecessary for this question. Retired to _answered/.