With close tor 40 million vehicles currently registered in the state of California you will have no joy with the California DMV bureaucracy searching for any old long discarded registration records. They have their hands full with registrations of current vehicles, non ops, vehicle transfers, and drivers’ licenses. Even if they had any records, privacy law prevent disclosure of that sort of data. Even local residents find dealings with the DMV far less than user friendly.
John F. Quilter
Eugene, Oregon USA
A bit of background: Mike’s dealer listing from 1963 shows the Jaguar dealer in Monterey at 777 Del Monte Avenue. This location existed until sometime between 1990 and 1993 when they relocated to nearby Seaside, California to a totally new facility in an auto mall district at 1711 Del Monte Blvd. The original, very old property, which had been a dealer for decades, was beach front property and was bought by the city or state and returned to a public access beach in concurrence with the state’s goal of public access to beaches. Furthermore, manufacturers put considerable pressure on retailers to periodically upgrade their facilities, or completely relocate, for more modern state of the art showrooms and service departments and this old location was due for that for many years. I am uncertain if in the succeeding years this retailer changed ownership but in my extensive experience as a regional warranty manager for Jaguar Land Rover North America few dealers would maintain service or sales records much beyond 10 years and likely often only for a period beyond the warranty unless the car came in for service from time to time after the warranty expiration. Vehicle records when a dealership buy/sell took place was even less likely.
John F. Quilter
Eugene, Oregon USA
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John
Thanks for that piece of information, investigating from so far away it is difficult to know where to start. Your background and advice will be valuable to not only me but other Brits (and others) who will follow me all trying to get the history of their cars. I noted also what you said regarding the move of this dealership to a new facility and I guess that makes it even more unlikely that they would have retained lots of old car records, so although a little disappointing to hear what you say, it will save me a lot of wasted time and effort.
I don’t know how your reply or this thread can be elevated into what I think is known as a ‘sticky’, but with so many E Types in particular being repatriated back to the UK, I would guess there a a fair number of owners try to find their cars history, so elevating your information would do them a good service.
Also I noted your further reply about the DMV, which given the numbers of vehicles and changes in the state of California, again makes logic that they are not going to keep some of these very old records.
So John, many thanks for the valuable insight to how Jaguar LandRover NA systems operated in this respect.
Tony
John
I just checked on the addresses you gave above and what a surprise, the LandRover dealer you mentioned in Monterey was literally a couple of blocks down the street from the dealer who brokered the sale of my E Type, what a coincidence.
Tony
Mike
Thanks for the info and as you have perhaps read there is a coincidence between the JLR dealer and the garage that brokered the sale of my car to me.
Do you or anyone else have any contact details for a local Jaguar owners club in that area, a long shot but in view of John Quilter’s information I am wondering whether a past owner is still around and in a local club.
Thanks
Tony
Came across this thread while responding in another. I’ve been waiting for an excuse to post this, if only to generate some interest. Here in Ontario you can for a nominal fee trace the history of your car back as far as March, 1973 where the records begin. When I did it the MoT supplied personal information which, given the sensitivity around privacy these days they may no longer do.
This is the first page of the report I received:
It’s dated November 11, 2016, shows the VIN 1E18311 and report type. It identifies the car as a black ‘68 Jaguar XKE convertible, unfit so no license plate. This was after I had moved from BC back to Ontario and had not yet put the car through the mandatory safety inspection to reregister it.
The next block of data identifies me by name as the current owner, in addition to my drivers license number, which I’ve blacked out rather than publicise. The last six digits of the Ontario drivers license number is the date of birth of the holder - useful information when tracing history. I registered the car in my name on June 11, 1982.
The next block lists the vanity licence plate XKE421, which was assigned to the car on November 16, 1982 and removed October 27, 2000 after I’d moved to Montréal and below that the plate SNZ166 that was assigned to the car on March 20, 1982. This was the plate that was on the car when I bought it. At the time in Ontario, the car and the plate went together, while now it’s the licensee and the plate. What it doesn’t show is the colour of the car at that time, which was BRG. I resprayed it black the following year (now back to BRG).
The second page is where things get more interesting from an historical perspective as it identifies the previous two owners:
I bought the car from Barry Gilmore - I’ve blacked out his drivers license number as well. It says he bought the car on or shortly before January 22, 1981, so he owned it only one year and five months before he sold it to me. Mr. Gilmore removed licence plate HBP877 three months before that and replaced it with SNZ166. HBP877 was issued June 6, 1973. This, I believe, is an indication the car was taken off the road after an accident. When I stripped off the previous BRG paint I found a lot of body solder in the left front fender and the left engine subframe was bent and cracked.
Mr. Gilmore bought the car from Ian Pattison, who purchased it on or shortly before May 22, 1979 - so he owned it for only one year and eight months. With the help of Google, I was able to find Mr. Pattison, who was only too happy to talk to me about “his” Jaguar. He loved the car but found it an impractical winter conveyance.
The third page
identifies Christopher Dingle as the earliest owner on record. He is shown to have registered the car on March 8, 1973, which is the date from which the Ontario ownership records were kept - previous years lost to posterity. I was also able to track Mr. Dingle down, who was also happy to spend some time with me on the phone. He said he’d owned several E-types and kept this one the longest. He unfortunately couldn’t remember the name of the man he bought it from
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I did something similar with my 2+2 tracing the car back to the second owner who bought the car from the first back around 1973. I was the fifth owner. As the car was relocated in multiple states, I had to contact the DMV in each state for their information.
I’m pretty sure I couldn’t do that today. My understanding is states have pretty much stopped providing that information to private parties, citing personal data privacy concerns.
Yes, that’s kind of unfortunate. JDHT the same. I certainly have no objection to passing on my ownership history and expect most POs would feel the same … except maybe their birth dates that the Ontario MoT freely gave out.
Hello Nick
It seems an age since I started this enquiry, but it seems the USA rules on passing on previous owners details are a real no-no. In my experience over the years I have found most previous owners have been only too pleased to learn their old vehicle still exists and happy to pass on any information to the current owner. So quite why we have such draconian measures to prevent this happening I am left wondering.
Now thankfully it appears many owners maintain a log file of any work done, often with accompanying photographs and receipts,.Whether this is due to the lack of cooperation from government departments I don’t know, but has to be a good thing for those of us that want to preserve a history file on any vehicle we own. After all we are only custodians and it makes sense to preserve as much of its history in the same way we preserve the metalwork.and not as if we want to steal state secrets.
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Thank you for posting that: it’s a fascinating insight into the cars’s history… and my carburetors… 
The stories like this make me grateful to know that the ownership chain of my old Jaguar is pretty simple.
When I spoke with Mr. Pattison he asked me how I was getting along tuning the triple SUs. It’s apparent they were removed during the intervening ownership and replaced with the dual Stroms I donated to your JeeType project. I’m wondering if this was also the time the original engine was replaced.
Would Mr Pattison know that answer?
No, the swap happened after he sold the car. The next owner did the swap, but my attempts to locate and chat with him have hit a dead end.
An interesting, at least to me, tidbit that fell out of that sleuthing exercise seven years ago is Mr. Pattison and I were living in the same city in Northern Ontario at the time of his ownership. I was always on the lookout for an E-type and in the spring of ‘79 went to see a BRG ‘68 Series 1.5 that was fitted with a black hardtop. Nobody home when I showed up so I got only to look at the car through the garage window. Never followed up. This is almost certainly the same car I would end up buying three years later.
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Karsmet…
It’s a small world.
By the time I bought the car I’d moved 500 miles east. The car meanwhile had moved 500 miles further south. It was advertised in the Toronto Autotrader and I called the vendor for information and to negotiate a price. I asked him at the time if the car had triples, as all Canadian delivery ‘68s had, but he said something to the effect that, no, the duals are much easier to tune. Whether or not that was his motivation to swap them out, or because he could have traded the setup for duals plus a chunk of cash, or he’d blown the engine and just did a wholesale swap of a short stud engine from an early ‘69 I can only speculate. All kind of academic, anyway. The impression he conveyed, both over the phone and in person when I picked it up, was that he was fed up with owning the car and just wanted to get rid of it. He’d apparently not had a good experience with it.
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Well, let’s face it: it takes a certain type of personality to deal with these cars when they’re in good shape, and to bring them back, when they are not, requires sn even larger dosage of that type of personality.
I think that, almost to a person, everyone here has that type of personality.
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That’s what you call a motivated seller.
Yes. Hard to miss. He dropped his price by almost 30% in the end.
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What a small world enjoyed that Nick
When I lived in Ontario one of my Jag buddies was a fellow Carl Jardenski his car was 200 # from mine a cream S1 he’d rebuilt
Anyone know him
When we were involved with hockey personal information was really becoming guarded starting around 2005 .some people don’t want to be found
Divorce, Restraining order’s etc that’s what drives a lot of the secrecy
At that time it was a 15 year old English car not known for reliability for various reasons ( deferred mtx). Many could buy them , not many could afford to maintain them and they where competing with Datsun 240s etc new tech
There’s profit in grief
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