Romance of the Ranchos was based on the title records of its sponsor, Title Insurance and Trust Company of Los Angeles. It was designed to give listeners a sense of changing times through changing ownership of the land: "Perhaps this is the story of the rancho on which your home is now located." The vastness of the sponsor's records was emphasized (more than 3,000 volumes), and the writers job was "to make those dry records live and breathe." The original series told of the ranchos that once existed where Westwood, Culver City, and Azusa now stood. W. W. Robinson of Title Insurance was the researcher. _{Johnn DUnning}