The original volume from which this book is taken, Burgess McK. Shumway's Ranchos of California: Patented Private Land Grants Listed by County, was one of a series of noteworthy research projects produced by the Federal Writ-ers Project of the Works Project Administration. The WPA was a Depression-era attempt by the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to provide paying jobs for the nation's unemployed workers, including out-of-work artists, writers, and other creative individuals. The FWP took these unemployed authors and set them to producing state and city travel guides, county records manuals, census indexes, local and regional histories, and a great many other projects of interest to the historian and researcher. Regrettably, many of the projected series were never finished, having been terminated with the outset of World War II. Also unfortunately, more than half of the books which did appear were published in mimeographed form only, in editions of no more than 250 copies, with poor typography (often typed copy), inferior paper, and cheap bindings. Few copies survive today, and most of these are brittle, faded, and difficult to read.