I bought my Martin J12-16GT 12 string acoustic guitar in November 2002.    According to the serial number look-up on the Martin website, it was built that year.

A Martin guitar can be identified by its model number.  The J means it's a jumbo body style.  In reality, this guitar is not appreciably bigger than a dreadnaught guitar.  The 12 indicates that it is a twelve string.  The 16 is the ornamentation series and the GT tells you that it has a gloss top.  

The top is solid sitka spruce with a gloss finish and the back and sides are solid genuine mahogany with a semi-gloss finish.  As with all Martin guitars, the tone is superb, the action great and the guitar is just plain fun to play.  By Martin standards, this is a fairly inexpensive 12-string guitar.  A good friend of mine who is a very accomplished guitarist played it and when he found out the price, called it a "best buy"!  Everything you want to know about Martin guitars can be found on their web site.

In October 2010, one of the gentlemen that I jam with in Dexter asked me if I wanted to accompany him to Dave Nichols' shop.  As old friends, he was going up to visit him the next day.  I hadn't been there in five years so I did go and took this guitar with me.  The action was starting to raise and I thought it would be a good idea to have him look at it.  It turns out that the bridge was starting to separate from the body ... a humidity thing.  They kept it overnight and I went back the next day to pick it up.  Martin has a complete unconditional guarantee on its guitars to the original owners so it didn't cost me anything to have it fixed.

Since I own and carry the sound equipment for our jam group and play bass guitar with this group, it reached a point where I wasn't using this guitar much.  There are just too many strings to tune when I have so many other things going on.  We spent four weeks in Florida between October 12 and November 12, 2017.  I advertised this on Craigslist and sold it to a man near Orlando, Florida on October 24, 2017.