How do you find out how many owners your Studebaker has had?

[Guest]

How do you find out how many owners your Studebaker has had? I would like to find out how many people have owned this Studebaker before me. How do I go about this? Thanks.

[Chris_Dresbach]

It's not easy, unless the car has a good paper trail. You have to know the previous owner and hope that they know they previous owner and so forth. The other way is if the BMV has a record of licensing the car to drive, but that's only if the car wasn't parked and sold a few times and if it remained in the same state the whole time.

[Skip Lackie]

As Chris noted, unless the car has been in one state its whole life, you can't. At one time, states kept paper records almost indefinitely. Now that they are all computerized, most old records are expunged as soon as new records are created. In SOME states, DMVs will trace a car's previous ownership backwards though its records (for a price). But the trail usually goes cold if the car was brought in from another state.

[Roscomacaw]

The truth is, once government agencies started to embrace privacy guarantees in earnest, they offered significantly less info about previous owners. I haven't tried in years, but the last time I went thru the California DMV, they'd only reveal how many years the car had been registered in the state - I could get nothing about who had owned it other than the person I bought it from.

[candbstudebakers]

I once picked up a rusty damaged 55 coupe from San Diego, I knew the paper work was all screwed up as the car came in from New York and one owner started to get it into the California system and stopped half way and sold or gave the car away and the next person started and found there was to much owed in back fees and stopped, they had no real title for the car, owner tried to sell the car on e-bay and when the high bidder came to get it and found it didn't have a title he backed off since he was going to take it into Mexico to restore, no title no crossing the boarder, any way I did end up with it rather cheap and trailered it to my yard, after letting it sit for about 6 months I went to DMV to see if I could get some info on the car, I told the lady I was thinking of buying this car and wanted to know if there were back fees due she started into the computer and stopped and asked me where was this car I told her a lady in San Diego owner it , that must have been what she was seeing and would only tell me it had a lot of fees due, end of conversation, so that done I knew I could do nothing but scrap it out, best thing I ever did in the end I ended up with about $3500 in parts money and cut up the rusty frame and body. one never knows where a deal will take him in the Studebaker world.

[Retired]

This may not be the case today. In the mid seventies I pirchased a 42 Commander Sedan Coupe from the Harrah (HOLIDAY iNN) Collection. It was built in the LA plant, sold new in the state of Washington. I wrote the secretary of the sate and low and behold I received a package containing copies of the the registration of the five previous owners. Armed with this information I wrote to all five. I received replys some with photographs of the Commander taken when in was in their ownership.