Boxes 1-2 contain a set of 102 documents relating to California ranchos in 1802-1877, including Buena Vista in Monterey County, La Brea and Las Animas in Santa Clara County, and Corralitos, San Andrés, Soquel, and Soquel Augmentation in Santa Cruz County. An inventory and index to these documents are available here.

Boxes 3-11 contain research materials compiled by the Rowlands, including some original pre-statehood documents. An inventory for this portion of the collection is available here.

Through the course of their research, the Rowlands created over nine thousand index cards that capture their notes on the history prominent figures and locales of Santa Cruz County.

This set of 9,327 index cards has been transcribed and indexed. See the Rowland Card Database for transcriptions of the cards. See the Index to Rowland Cards for a comprehensive index to any person or subject referred to in the cards.

• Rowland Card Database  
• Index to Rowland Cards  

The cards are arranged in alphabetical order, divided according to surnames of people and subjects. See Card Categories for a complete list of the categories.

Boxes A-1 through A-5 contain 3x5 inch index cards with descriptions of people. Box A-6 contains larger cards that also describe people, mostly late in the alphabet from M through Z. Many of the entries on these cards have been crossed out in pencil; presumably, as the information was transferred at a later time to smaller cards in the red boxes. [The transcribers have included the crossed-out information.] Rowland used a standard set of abbreviations on his cards. See Rowland Abbreviations for a list of abbreviations used in his cards.

The cards in boxes B-1, B2, and B-3 describe selected subjects, in categories ranging from Banks through Taxes, including such diverse categories as Land Grants, County Roads, Railroads, and Padrónes (a census of people or animals).

Box C includes transcripts of the Pre-Statehood Documents in Spanish. Some have been translated from the Spanish by Leon Rowland, but many of the cards in Box C have not been translated. [Researchers may wish to compare Rowland's translations with California pre-statehood documents relating to Santa Cruz County, 1790-1850; English translation of Spanish documents by Starr Pait Gurcke. Spec Coll MS105]. See Spanish Terms for definitions of many Spanish terms on the cards. Box C also contains a set of cards illustrating California cattle brands. See Cattle Brand Images for a list of these brand illustrations.

• Card Categories  
• Rowland Abbreviations  
• Spanish Terms  
• Cattle Brand Images