---
title: "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?"
type: "question"
status: "answered"
date_answered: "2026-07-25T00:00:00.000Z"
answered_by: ["30-notes/claim-amicable-society-1706-fixed-dividend-fund-divided-equally-per-death.md","30-notes/claim-premature-negative-finding-amicable-dividend-was-an-unlocated-installment.md"]
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_raised: "2026-07-23T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["actuarial-history","insurance","institutional-history","mechanism","verification"]
---


[[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/`.