Hard-to-find Information

This is interesting. There are lots of things that can be learned or discovered easily through the process of a little research. You can find out weather for a particular day in the past, or the history of a place that you're familiar with, or names and dates and places for significant events. But if you want to find out about the existence at some point in the past for something like a car dealership, it can be nearly impossible. If it's a significant dealership, like Nickey Chevrolet or Grand Spaulding Dodge in Chicago, dealerships that were synonymous with muscle cars from the '60s and '70s, then you might have some luck. If it's not such a significant place, it is very near impossible it seems to find anything about it. I own an older Cadillac. I purchased information from GM about it's order and shipment. It is listed as being sold to and shipped to a dealership in Brookfield, IL. There is no current Cadillac dealer in Brookfield though, and so I started doing a little digging. What I found is absolutely nothing, zero. There is NO information apparently ANYWHERE about a former Cadillac dealer in Brookfield, Illinois. There are apparently no business registries from back then, no historic yellow pages, absolutely nothing.

I'm sure a dealership would have had to pay a license fee to the city and state possibly, but where would one go to retrieve these records? Do they even exist? And if they do, how willing would a state or local government
be to go digging through some old books to dig it up and give it to me? This apparent complete lack of any historical information about a dealership is made all the more bizarre, when I go cruising in my near-perfect old
Cadillac. The car actually exists, boy does it exist, it's great, it's beautiful. It came from somewhere. But while the car lives on in it's full glory, where it came from is apparently now a mystery for the ages. Had I looked into this in the '90s, or '80s, then maybe I would have found some clue. But as it stands, all I know is that my classic Cadillac came from some mysterious place in Brookfield, Illinois, the identity of which may remain unknown forever.