It’s an artifact-light exhibit, but there is one item that is a favorite of the curatorial staff: a small embroidered purse with a handwritten gift tag. It’s one of several Christmas presents bought by Naomi Whitehead Ellis Ford, an expectant mother, in the fall of 1918. She died a few weeks later, and the gifts remained packed away for decades.

“In a sense,” Dr. Boyd said, “what we’re trying to do is a little bit of a memorial so these people are not forgotten.”

Interactive maps, a high-tech departure from the museum’s usual displays, help visitors see the effect of the flu by overlaying data culled from death certificates onto maps. One tracks the flu over time, dotting city blocks with deaths until all of Philadelphia is a heat map of infection.

Neighborhoods can be explored on a micro level so visitors can see who might have died on a block, a feature that was made possible because of the work of Nicholas Bonneau, who led the research for the exhibition, and his team of volunteers and students, who sifted through and transcribed tens of thousands of death certificates.

After two years, they had 17,500 documented flu deaths — most likely fewer than there actually were because of mistakes on death certificates and a community overwhelmed by trauma.

While some deaths were harder to map because of development, in a city as historic as Philadelphia, it’s entirely likely Philadelphians could discover that someone died of the flu in their home. (George Keichline, a 47-year-old upholsterer, died at my address.)