Welcome
To Lehigh County, Pennsylvania
History and Genealogy

Presented by

Pennsylvania Trails History and Genealogy

Welcome to Genealogy Trails
Volunteers working to put free historical data online.

My name is Vicki Hartman and as your Lehigh County, Pennsylvania host I try to post as much data online as possible in order to make it freely available to all.
We gratefully accept contributions of raw data such as census information, marriage/birth/death records, obituaries, county histories, biographies, old newspaper items - anything that would help someone build their family tree!!

The following is from the book, History of the Counties of Lehigh and Carbon, in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania by Alfred Mathews and Austin N. Hungerford, 1884:

"Erection of Lehigh County: That part of the territory of Northampton lying west of the Lehigh, south of the Blue Ridge, and bounded on the southwest by the county of Berks, had by 1810 so increased in population that the project of securing its organization as a separate county naturally arose in the minds of its most active men. The people settled here were so far away from Easton that the journey thither to transact business was a great inconvenience to them. Besides that, Allentown ahd for a number of years aspired to become a seat of local government, and in early days her citizens had even hoped and endeavored to have the town made the capital of Northampton County. these considerations led to the petitioning of the General Assembly for the organization of a new county. The project met with favor, and upon March 6, 1812, the Assembly passed an act erecting Lehigh County. It was decreed by that law -

"That all that part of Northampton County, lying and being within the following townships, to wit, the townships of Lynn, Heidelberg, Lowhill, Weissenberg, Macungie, Upper Milford, South Whitehall, North Whitehall, Northampton, Salisbury, Upper Saucon and that part of Hanover within the following bounds to wit, beginning at the Bethlehem line where it joins the river Lehigh, thence along the said line until it intersects the road leading from Bethlehem to the Lehigh Water Gap, thence along said road to Allen township line, thence along the line of Allen township westwardly to the Lehigh, shall be and the same are hereby, according to their present lines, declared to be erected into a county henceforth to be called Lehigh." "


Its county seat is Allentown.

Lehigh County is named after the Lehigh River, which runs through the county's two largest cities, Allentown and Bethlehem. It is located in the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania, in the eastern part of the state.