Word history

A gazette is an old name for a newspaper. There are still plenty of these around, like the Schenectady Gazette and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Naturally, a person working at a gazette became known as a gazetteer (today we would call that person a reporter). One of the vexing problems in the seventeenth century is that there was no standard way of spelling many words, particularly proper names and especially place names. Hence The Gazetteer's, or Newsman's Interpreter: Being a Geographical Index, published in 1693. Eventually, any list of place names became known as a gazetteer and the original meaning was lost.

Band history

The Gazetteers have always included Frank Boscoe, Rob Christiansen, and Jeannine Durfee; have often included Steve Silverstein; and occasionally included Andrea McEwen and John Lancia. The band came together at Rob and Jeannine's wedding in 2000. Certainly amid the giddiness of the occasion, it would have been reasonable to forget about it the next morning. Instead, here it is eight years later and album number three is almost complete. Not tremendously prolific, but not too bad, either.