I don't think we can infer much about original distribution from dealer acquisitions 100 years later unless the provenance is a family inheritance or similar direct line of descent. I recently picked an estate from a family home that had been passed down for five generations and got a cache of original to the family cards, but other than coming across something like that, there is very little chance of proving a group is an original assemblage of pack-pulled items. I've had it happen twice with prewar cards. I've also had people walk in crazy rare assemblages of cards that came from estate sales, dumpster dives, flea markets, etc. Speaking specifically to Red Cross cards, at one World Boxing Hall of Fame show here in Los Angeles, I had a walk-in with seven T219 Red Cross cards. No idea of what they were, he just got them in a junk sale with a bunch of other cards. I also watched an N386 Spaulding & Merrick Sullivan walked into the 2006 Anaheim National by a junk dealer. He got it from picking somewhere in Los Angeles.
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