GM Heritage Center Information Kits
The GM Heritage Center Archives has the GM "information" kits available online in .PDF document format. Note that .PDF files require Adobe Acrobat Reader or some other program that can read a .PDF file.
I also have these files for Chevelle/El Camino/Monte Carlo on my ChevyWorld website along with Camaro (1967-1977), Chevy II/Nova (1962-1977) and full-size Chevrolets (1955-1977) and Corvette (1953-1982) on my CorvetteWorld website.
Other Chevrolet models are also available online such full size Chevrolets, Luminas, Cavaliers, Citations, Vegas, trucks, and later versions of Camaro, Nova, Monte Carlo, etc. than shown in these links.
If your car was originally sold or built in Canada, you will have to contact Vintage Vehicle Services. There is a fee for this service but they'll send you, what I refer to as a 'confirmation sheet' showing when/where the car was built along with all the options it came with. Latest information I have of the cost is $119.00 CDN as of October 2013; for U.S dollars, whatever the current exchange rate is. See here for more details.
Chevrolet produced more vehicles than all the other GM divisions combined and thereby generated a much higher volume of records which were a storage problem.
After the end of a year's production, the build records have very little business value to Chevrolet and therefore were not considered to be high priority for retention. GM record retention policy required the assembly plants to retain said documents for only about six months.
Meanwhile, back at the Tech Center in Warren, Michigan, the Chevrolet Engineering Records Retention Policy called for periodic destruction of non-essential records, of which the build documents were one, and this was carried out on a routine basis. The other GM divisions, Cadillac, Pontiac, etc., had much smaller production volumes and interpreted the GM Records Retention Policy differently and therefore retained said documents.
According to Jim Mattison who was a long time GM employee and founder of the Pontiac Historical Society GM had records stored in a facility dating back to the 20's and 30's. A secretary at the facility decided GM did not need to keep all those 'old records' and had them all destroyed.
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