Bios & Obits

Bloomfield Resident Records

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• We have an Index to Obituaries found in the Independent Press & Bloomfield Life Newspapers for those dying 2005-2015 or 1973-2005.

  • Tip 1:  Indexes are especially useful for finding family names of others living in Bloomfield.  Search the lists using CONTROL-F to find a particular name (also helpful to find maiden names further down the list).  Also, be flexible with possible misspelling of names.

  • Tip 2: If a name is not listed in the index, it  does not mean there is no death notice or obituary.  These records were kept on and off by volunteers from 1973-2015 and names may be missing. 

  • Tip 3: Death notices may be printed.  To find the records not listed, check the newspapers themselves approx. one or two weeks after the Bloomfield resident’s date of death.  Index for 2016 ended approx. September 2016. For those and more recent obituaries, you can also look online.

• For more recent obituaries, look online:

  • NJ.com obituaries

  • North Jersey Obituaries

• Check local newspapers for important events in our ancestor's lives.

• NJ Death Index -  Reclaim the Records (RtR) wins the New Jersey Death Index 1904-2017.  RtR is trying to retrieve some of the missing records with the help of staff at the New Jersey State archives in Trenton. They are being very helpful.  For years that are missing RtR will order microfilms from the archives and then scan and put the data online. This will not happen for a while. But the 1930-1948 records will still be missing any index. The records they were able to get are indexes—not actual death records—of the New Jersey death index for: 

  • about half of 1920-1924,

  • all of 1925-1929, 1949-2017.

  • The following years of the New Jersey Death index are still missing: 1904-1919 ,half of 1920-1924 and 1930-1948.

Military Records

• Special Collections: Soldiers:

  • Civil War Soldiers buried in Bloomfield Cemetery

  • Officers and Men Buried in Glendale, Mt Olive, Brookdale cemeteries

  • Davis, Alexander, Monument

• Florence E Roberts Memorial Collection -  Records of Servicemen carefully kept for a dozen years by Mrs. Florence E Roberts, secretary to Mayor Donald H Scott, were donated to the Bloomfield Public Library for permanent safekeeping in 1953. The files contain thousands of cards listing Bloomfield servicemen who served in WW2 and Korea.  Digitization in progress.  Please call the Reference Desk for those not yet digitized.

  • Died in Service

  • Bloomfield in War

• Essex County Heroes of Today: Bloomfield & Glen Ridge Section   WWI

• Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System (NPS). a database containing information about the men who served in the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. Other information on the site includes histories of Union and Confederate regiments, links to descriptions of significant battles, and selected lists of prisoner-of-war records and cemetery records, which will be amended over time.

• Fold3 - Subscription database.  Charges.

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Also, check the website, Fold3.com.  You can view some records with a free subscription, but other records cost.  To save, subscribe to their email updates and wait for a holiday that celebrates veterans, during which time they offer further records for free for a limited duration.

Cemetery Records

• Special Collections: Cemetery Files Included within are copies of what is in Special collections. The following booklets:

  • Bloomfield and Montclair Cemetery Inscriptions before 1880

  • Bloomfield Cemetery Walking Tour 2001 (has bios)

  • Brookdale Dutch Reformed Church

  • Old Stonehouse Plains map of plots

  • Old Methodist Burying Ground Inscriptions

  • Inscriptions from the Bloomfield Cemetery

• Glendale Cemetery

• Bloomfield Cemetery from Findagrave.com

• Mt Olivet Cemetery on FindaGrave.com

• Findagrave.com  - looking for a grave anywhere but don't live close?  Findagrave has a service where you can request a local take a picture of a gravestone for you.

• Billiongraves.com  - searchable GPS cemetery data, and is growing bigger and better every day. You can help by collecting headstone images from local and other cemeteries, and then by transcribing the personal information found on the images.

• JOWBR  - From JewishGen, Worldwide burial registry.