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Archival Records of the
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| Welcome to the real "meat-and-potato's" of this web-site; the section that will hopefully be the most useful to both the hardcore collector, and casual observer of British Columbia license plates. It is here that you will find all the pure stats (no analysis, or interpretation on my part) regarding the issuing of license plates since 1904. |
An Act to Regulate the Speed and Operation of Motor Vehicles on Highways 1904 to 1911 |
When the Act to Regulate the Speed and Operation of Motor Vehicles on Highways was passed in 1904, Section 3 required the Superintendent of Provincial Police to issue for each registered motor vehicle a number, and to "cause the name of such owner, with his address and the number of his permit, to be entered in a book to be kept for such purpose." |
With regard to the two Register's laid out in landscape (i.e. Volumes 2 & 3), these appear to have been maintained by the MVB's Vancouver office as the most detailed entries in Volume 2 are for vehicles registered in the City of Vancouver and surrounding municipalities. |
While an effort was made to track the location of all numbers issued in Volume 2, including vehicles in towns and cities outside of Vancouver, this pretense was dropped in the Volume 3 with blank spaces becoming quite common and signifying vehicles registered elsewhere. Where the earlier entries are and how many books did this require we don't yet know and they may very well be lost. |
Finally, Volume 6 (at far right) is the Index of vehicle owners registered between 1904 and 1911, which is very handy when trying to confirm the spelling of a name in the Register: |
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An Act to Regulate the Use and Operation of Motor-vehicles 1911 to 1912 |
When a new Motor-traffic Regulation Act was passed on March 1, 1911, the requirement to register names and numbers in a book was replaced with a requirement for the Superintendent of Provincial Police to "annually, on or about the fifteenth day of January in each year, report to the Attorney-General under this Act, and each such report shall contain a statement of: |
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Thanks to our friends at the BC Legislative Library, a copy of the Decembert 1912 "Report" has been scanned and made available for public viewing. While also available at www.llbc.leg.bc.ca, we here at BCpl8s.ca have downloaded a copy and archived it on our site for ease of access (click on the image at far right). |
The best part about this December 1912 "Report" is that it has been OCR scanned (unlike the photos I take with my camera)! Consequently, we can search by name and find out the numbers of prominent politicians, industrialists and others such as Judge Irving (376), William Bowser (852), James Dunsmuir (753), T.W. Paterson (1008) and Richard McBride (2235). Who will you find?
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British
Columbia Vehicle Registration Information 1913 to 1920 |
Writing in June of 1913, Superintendent Colin Campbell advised a Constable that "there has been no list of the owners of Automobiles printed this year and I don't know that the Department will publish a list. However, in case you require to find out the registered owners of automobiles carrying any number, by telephoning or wiring this office and giving the number carried we will be able to tell you who the owner is." |
The Superintendent likely would have referred to the following registers when responding to such queries from his Constables: |
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 Index of Chauffeurs 1 to 3,000 (1915-16) (Volume 56) |
British
Columbia Vehicle Registration Information 1918 to 1922 |
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As you are probably aware, some of the biggest challenges in reading the MVB Registers presented above is the handwriting of the staff (which is not always clear) and the various dates at which a number might have been transferred or cancelled. |
.jpg) Well, one tool that helps to aid in deciphering some of these entries, albeit a very rare source of registration information, are copies of the Western Canadian Motorist which were put at the same time as the province started issuing its own license plates in 1913. To date, we have only come across two copies thanks to Bill Hobbis; these being from May 1913 (Volume 1, No. 6) and December 1913 (Volume 2,
No. 1). Based upon the numbers listed in the back of these two issues, it appears the new registrations as well as transfers were printed. If anyone reading this has other issues, I would be very interested in obtaining copies so please drop me a line! As for those issues we do have, they can be accessed here: |
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For later years, there are copies of the British Columbia Record newspaper, which took the time to print a column in almost every issue which recording "new Automobile Licenses, Transfers and Relinquishments Recorded for Vancouver and District". |
We have the excellent work being undertaken by the BC Historical Newspapers project at the University of British Columbia (UBC) - which is digitizing historical newspapers from around the province - to thank for this! |
According to the UBC site, the Record was published from June 1916 to July 1922 as the official publication for the Architectural Institute of BC, the BC Builders’ Exchange, and the Building and Construction Industries’ Exchange of BC and primarily covered news related to building, contracting, engineering, real estate, and industrial finance. |
To the best of our ability, we have attempted to present these as single columns in .jpeg format. While the Record ran from 1916 to 1922, UBC has, to date, only posted copies from June 1916 to December of 1920 (with a few gaps). We hope UBC is able to post the remaining editions at some future point (at which time we will present them here).
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While we work on a matrix to allow for searching out numbers, the extent of the information requires its own page, which can be accessed by Clicking Here (or the banner above). If you are looking for more specific information from this source, we would encourage you to use the link to the project site above and try their search capabilities.
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British
Columbia Vehicle Registration Information 1923 to 1929 |
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Finally, and while not specific to motor vehcile registrations from this period, the Vancouver Public Library has been digitizing old City Directories which can prove helpful when trying to decipher the specifics of an address or the exact spelling of a name. To access this treasure trove of information, Click Here! |
For ease of access, we have scanned the directory as an OCR .pdf, meaning it is searchable!!! Click on the links above to access it (NOTE: the file is 50mb in size, and saving it to your desktop/device is probably best), and if anyone out there has any other years we would be very interested in hearing from you! |
British
Columbia Vehicle Registration Information 1921 to 1976 |
1921 |
1922 |
1929 |
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1938 |
1939 |
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1956 |
1957 |
1958 |
1959 |
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1960 |
1961 |
1962 |
1963 |
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1973 |
1974 |
1975 |
1976 |
1977 |
1978 |
1979 |
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Is
technology not great? Six years after starting this section
of the web site, instead of having to type these tables out,
I can now simply scan the old MVB records into .pdf documents
that can be uploaded to the site for your viewing convenience. In other instances, we have transcribed available records so that they are more legible: |
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British Columbia Licensing Information |
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1925 was the first year that a British Columbia Driver's License
was issued, and the following information shows how many vehicles
were registered, and under what types. Missing years 1985-present. |
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British Columbia Motor Vehicle Legislation |
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| British Columbia Motor Vehicle Act Regulations | |||
© Copyright Christopher John
Garrish. All rights reserved.