When I arrived at the Waterfall Room in South Philadelphia on Sunday afternoon and saw the black-and-white film of my own house towering over me on the projector screen, I knew I was in the right place. The Cammaratas, the family who grew up in the Mifflin Street rowhouse my wife and I bought two years ago, had invited me to their extended family reunion. It would be an honor, I said.

I’d met them for the first time not long after I moved in. Three of the four Cammarata children had piled into my kitchen for tomato pie — and the story of more than half a century in the house, and of Antonette, the matriarch, a first-generation Italian American who died in 2015.