One of my favorite topics to write and speak about is: “What’s In A Name? A Lot of History,” exploring the history behind San Diego County placenames. On December 28, 2023, my wife and I made a visit to Cardiff, also known as Cardiff-by-the-Sea. That name triggered a research project.

Two of my most reliable sources on the topic of place names, Leland Fetzer’s book San Diego County Place Names A to Z, and the late Erwin G. Gudde’s California Place Names: The Origin and Entymology of Current Geographical Names, agree that the coastal community was named for the town of Cardiff, Wales and that the source of the name was one J. Frank Cullen. Some slightly more detailed sources I found, such as the website of Cardiff 101 Main Street, a non-profit community service organization, along with some real estate websites, describe Cullen as a former paperhanger from Massachusetts who came west around 1909, bought up some coastal land in an area then known as San Elijo (after a nearby lagoon) and began selling lots. Those sources along with Fetzer state that the original source for the name Cardiff was Cullen’s wife Esther, who was said to be a native of Wales. Esther was also said to have influenced her husband to give the town street names derived from the British Isles, such as Birmingham, Oxford, Chesterfield and Manchester.

I use the phrase “said to be” regarding Esther Cullen’s nationality because subsequent research into this couple indicated that Esther was born and raised in the USA and had never been anywhere near Wales or any other part of the United Kingdom, nor had her husband.

I found lots of ads and news items from mid-1910s San Diego newspapers about “the new beach town of Cardiff-by-the-Sea” and other J. Frank Cullen developments. But none of those ads or articles mentioned anything about the origins of the town’s name. When Esther Cullen died in 1943, her obituary gave her birthplace as Belfast, Maine. Your History Seeker research team did some more digging and found this same couple in three different United States Censuses (1910, 1920 and 1930). In each census Esther’s birthplace was given as Maine, and J. Frank’s as Massachusetts.

We also found this excerpt from the marriage register of Haverhill, Massachusetts in 1898 recording the marriage of J. Frank Cullen and Esther Young. The column on the farthest right gives the birthplace for each, Amesbury, Massachusetts for the groom and Belfast, Maine for the bride: 

But wait. Our research also led us to looking at maps of the states of Maine and Massachusetts, specifically the areas Esther and J. Frank came from. We noticed some names that sounded similar to the names of towns in the UK. We also found that there was a small town in Maine called Wales! But while we found some evidence that people from Wales in the UK had settled in Wales, Maine, a look at old maps there showed no street names similar to the names of UK places.

We also checked the names of neighbors around the Cullens in the US census for anyone from the UK or with UK roots, and found none. We did see some evidence that the Young family, including Esther prior to her marriage, had moved around to different communities. In fact, we found Esther’s younger brother, Ernest, was born in Lewiston, Maine. Lewiston is virtually next door to the town of Wales, Maine.  Could that be the Wales that Esther might have been referring to in conversations with people in San Diego decades later?

At this point that’s the closest we can offer to a theory on the origin of the name of Cardiff-by-the-Sea.