Each dot is a person we can place on a map. But for every death shown here, roughly seven more are not.
The addresses come from the 1791 Biddle Directory - a city directory that listed residents by name, trade, and street. It was essentially a book of people who mattered to commerce: master craftsmen, merchants, shopkeepers, professionals.
It did not list women under their own names. It did not list children. It did not list the enslaved, or most free Black Philadelphians, or servants, or sailors, or the itinerant poor. When those people died in the epidemic, Carey sometimes recorded their names - but the directory gives us no way to know where they lived.
The gaps on this map are not empty space. They are the people the city did not bother to count.
Watch the gray dots vanish as residents flee. The wealthy fled first. The poor, the enslaved, and the free Black community stayed.
Note: The population flight is a statistical simulation based on historical estimates (~20,000 of ~45,000 fled) and occupational records, not individual-level departure data. Who flees and when is modeled by occupation and neighborhood, weighted by the known epidemic timeline.