This project is focused upon two important resources. First, is a map of Allentown from 1876. Initially produced by Gustavus Aschbach of Allentown in 1871, an updated version was published in 1876 in The New Atlas of Lehigh County by F.A. Davis. A digital version of this atlas is provided for use by David Rumsey; click here (also employed as a header for this website). This map was georeferenced (place in its correct location on the earth) by using MapWarper, a freely available online tool developed by the New York Public Library. This map was then brought into CartoDB, an online mapping tool (commercial, but basic accounts are free).

The second resource is the 1880 census of Wards 1 and 6 (and some of Ward 2) of Allentown. The majority of the data was provided by the North Atlantic Population Project. To this we added street addresses from the 1880 census freely available on Ancestry.com. Street addresses were geocoded (converted from an address to a latitude/ longitude location) using Texas A&M Geoservices (free for academic projects). This data was then brought into CartoDB to be combined with the above map (see map in Introduction).