What's in a number plate

This afternoon I have been digitising some of our family photographs, concentrating on those featuring motor cars. Most of the vehicles in the pics were built from scratch by my Dad, a motor mechanic of extraordinary ability.

My lack of interest in and knowledge about cars is well known (as evidence check out my cellulite ridden Hyundai) but I was curious about the make and model of the vehicles captured in the photos as well as their owners and remembered a source discovered during my working days in the Battye Library. It is now available online.

If motor vehicles prior to 1930 appear in any of your family pics and the licence plate is visible, you can ascertain who the owner is as well as the manufacturer, by searching the digitised Yearbook and Road Guide of the Royal Automobile Club of WA on the State Library website.

The relevant section appears about halfway through the Yearbook and is organised in number plate order commencing with private metropolitan number plates, followed by commercial number plates and progressing through to those plates issued by the various country Roads Boards.

I am reasonably sure the RAC yearbooks of the other states have similar information and would contain, as does the WA edition, an alphabetical list of RAC members.

Bloss the blogger