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My mom bought the car new in Orlando, FL, in July 1970. She owned it until about 1987. It was sold in Florida around then.
VIN 344870E178663
internet searches tell me that it was recently registered in Groveland, Massachusetts. I would love to connect with the current owner and be considered if he or she is ever willing to sell.
I have the original invoice and window sticker. Would love to hear where the car has been and how it has survived.
internet searches tell me that it was recently registered in Groveland, Massachusetts.
I would be very interested to know how you found this out. I did a VIN search at the Massachusetts DMV website just now, and it shows that a car with this VIN was issued a title in November 1998 and that the title is active. It doesn't say anything about what city. I know that the a VIN search at the Ohio DMV site will not only tell you if the car is titled in the state, but, if it is, what county it's titled in. But that's it. No further info about city, owner name, or anything like that.
Regardless, it is likely to be difficult to get any more specific information due to privacy laws. Unless you're in law enforcement or something like that with a genuine need to know the current owner's contact info, it is unlikely to be released to you, at least through normal channels. If you really want to find the car, you might talk to a private detective.
There have been a fair number of posts like yours on this site over the years with people looking for a car they once owned years or decades ago, and I've never seen any of them come back to the site to say they found it. There is no national VIN database as vehicle records are kept at the state level, and old records, which were all on paper, are generally just discarded instead of digitized.
I sometimes put myself in the position of the person trying to be found and what I would think if I received a call or letter out of the blue from a complete stranger wanting to know about my car. Would I trust the person? Would I suspect a scam, especially if he offered to buy it from me? Would I have any reason to fear for my safety? Would I be upset at the DMV for giving out my info without my permission? Most likely I would just be glad to hear from a former owner and get more info about the history of the car. But if he wanted to meet, I'd probably do it in the parking lot of a Walmart or a shopping mall and not at my home, if I did it at all.
A few years ago I talked with a guy at the Dallas Autorama that had a 69 Chevelle he bought new. It was as 396 with an L whatever engine in it. It was an outstanding car. He told me he searched the number for a couple years until he got a hit one day. He was able to trace the car and bought it back. I don't know if just googled the number or how he found it. So, it has been done.
He told me he searched the number for a couple years until he got a hit one day. He was able to trace the car and bought it back.
I was thinking that a way that googling the VIN could work is if the car was ever sold at an auction. Mecum/whatever. The auction sites usually list the car's VIN, and the auction results often stay on the web for a long time. I've seen some going back a decade or more. The car you describe sounds like something that might have been sold at an auction at some point. If you got a hit on search like this, you might be able to find out from the auction company who bought it. Again, not sure of this, though, for possible privacy reasons. I don't know what Mecum would say if you asked for the name of the person who won an auction for one of their cars. Just thinking out loud.
Craigslist ads will sometimes list a car's VIN if the seller chooses to include it. For at least as long as the listing is active, the VIN would probably be found in a google search. But craigslist ads either expire or the seller takes it down when the car sells, so you'd have to be lucky enough to be doing the search just at the time the car is listed. Again, just thinking out loud.
I wish I had asked more about how he actually found it. He told me he would try it every day. Then one morning after breakfast he got a hit. It was a good story. When he found the car it was in pretty sad shape. It had been repainted white (originally orange) and had a small block in it. He took it some small shop in Arkansas that did one car at a time. For how well it turned out, he had to stroke some pretty big checks. Great story though.
i found my 65 442 i sold in the early 90's.my local dmv is great,i went in and told them i was looking for my old car they searched my records and found i had something like 43 cars still listed as on record.well alot of em got junked and i still have the titles.anyway i told em it would be a 13 digit vin and start with 3 for olds.the next day she calls and says she found it and it is licensed and if i would like to leave my name and number she would forward the info to the owner to contact me if they decided to.about 3 weeks later he called me,and turns out it was the guy i sold it to.as it turned out he never titled it in his name until about 6 months before i asked about it.he lost his storage and had it in his driveway and the cops said he had to license it or remove it.so he licensed it.if he wouldn't have done that i never would have found it.
Keep trying various methods and you may find it. You are off to a good start by asking on this site, if it still exists it could belong to a member or someone may spot it at an event.
I kind of internet cache-searched my '72 ragtop shortly after I bought it in 2016 and actually hit on a prior web ad that had been posted back in the late 90's on the now-expired Tripod search engine. It clearly depicted my car in essentially the exact condition I purchased it, right down to the same Sears nearly-new looking white walls it was still wearing when I bought the car - in the ad it had Delaware tags with a 2000 sticker showing. Being the car was originally sold new in Pittsburgh PA (the original sale docs came with the car), that made sense.
I actually emailed the seller listed in that ad, his ph# and email were still valid - he remembered the car but not much about it except having owned it for about 1.5 years before selling it to a buyer in North Florida (which fits because I bought it out of Deland, which is near Daytona Beach).
In the ad, he described how the car had been recently painted and new rear springs installed (they did look new when I first saw the car in person) - the mileage listed in the ad made sense as well because it was relatively close to what I bought the car with - in a perfect world indicating it hadn't been driven much between the time he sold it and I bought it. It changed hands at least once in FL before I bought it because the people I got it from didn't have much history with it.
Unfortunately that's where my trail went cold, since the original owners had previously passed per available internet info there is 1 possible relative (a daughter) that I found info for but I never did reach out.
I purchased a 1967 442 in 2015 in Indiana from a gentleman who had purchased it 26 years earlier. He did not have any information on any of the prevoius owners including the guy he bought it from. All I knew was the original owner was from Texas (from the POP) and it still had a 1989 Oklahoma inspection sticker on it. I contacted both the Texas and Oklahoma websites and got copies of the form you fill out requesting information on a given VIN. The forms are clearly not for the average car owner/collector, more for law enforcement and insurance companies. So, I went to my insurance agent and asked him to see what he could do. It took about 2-3 weeks but he got information from both states which helped me fill in some of the blanks. I later asked him to do the same for the state of Michigan and he got nowhere.
All you can do is try and I think it cost me less than $25.00 total.
First of all, that "Just Married" picture is awesome. I assume that is your mother driving with her new hubby riding shotgun?
After 3 years of searching for my 70 Cutlass SX (sold 8 years previous) I was able to locate it and reacquire it this last July '23.
I started by searching the internet regularly for the vin #. This actually got me a few hits and I started tracking leads. I found a discussion about this car on the Yenko sYc site! They were discussing having seen the car in a recent Ebay ad! I was not able to locate the ad, but I kept searching. I posted a want ad on this site and got a few more leads. I found a dealer in Ohio that had sold it to the current owners. The dealer was useless and would not even help me at all. The Ohio DMV site informed me that the car was currently registered in the Canton area. This really narrowed my search. I posted a want ad in the OCA Ohio chapter sites. One thing led to another, and I finally ended up talking to the owner of a Corvette restoration shop that had rebuilt the engine about 6 months previous. This led me to the current owners.
I was very apprehensive about making a cold call to the owners but I'm glad I did. I was very aware that the owner might freak and just hang up on me. She was indeed shocked, so I immediately started telling her all about the car and things I had done to it over the years - something no one could possibly guess. A previous owner had put together a book of much of the pictures and information I provided to him when I first sold it. I started telling her all about the info in that book - again, stuff no one else could know. This really put her at ease. She got her husband and they put me on speaker. We had a really nice conversation and we both learned something about the car. They took about a week to make a decision and finally called me back to let me know they were willing to sell the car to me. When I flew out there, they met me at my hotel with the car. Again, some really interesting and fun conversation. Really nice people. I ended up driving the car away and we were both very happy.
Don't underestimate the power of "one thing led to another". The more places you search, the more leads you get and follow up on, the better your chances. The internet really made this possible.
February 29th, 2024, 09:22 PM
