Customer Reviews

San Diego County Place Names, A To Z (Adventures in the Natural History and Cultural Heritage of t)

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After reading Leland Fetzer's book San Diego County Place Names, A to Z, I was impressed with the amount of resources available to him and his approach to places long since gone. I have learned much more about the railroad stations that have since vanished and their main purpose of being there. Leland has gone to the leingth to mention that many forgotten places had schools, stores and other buildings. Leland also went to the great leingth to add people to places now overlooked.

Unfortunatly for Leland, is the fact that the format of his book was written much like a journalist than a historian. With such great resources like David Durham's Place Names of San Diego County and H. Sally"s Post Office History of California to start with, I was dissappointed that Leland couldn't say more. Why Leland used mostly modern maps for resources is beyond me. I have many older San Diego County maps and many show different than what is said in his book. Leland also mentioned that he used the U.S. Census for early citizens records but failed to list the populations of some of the early communities and districts, instead he relied on the San Diego City and County directories.

My final line is that this book is still a valuable assett but needs to be read with much caution since, in many cases, there is more than is stated in his book.

This nice thing about this place names book is that it is up to date and has been better fact checked than previous books. You will learn a lot of interesting things about San Diego County. I recommend this book if this county is your home. Some of the entries are really brief. Don't expect more than a few sentences for most. I'm guessing the goal of the book may have been to keep it compact. The author also has an unusual tendency to insert his own commentary, some of which are funny, but it adds nothing and wastes space like: "Trouble Camp:... A very unusual name for a military base." No kidding. That's why I was looking it up.