At the unveiling of the Bloomfield Cemetery QR tour are, from left, Mary Jones, cemetery superintendent; Girl Scout Laura Capezio, tour creator; Beth Capezio, troop leader; and Bonnie Sharkey, local Daughters of the American Revolution regent
Bloomfield Cemetery and the Maj. Joseph Bloomfield Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution held a ceremony at the burial grounds, Saturday morning, June 20, to mark their joint observance of the American Semiquincentennial.
The event was the unveiling of a self-guided, QR-coded tour of the gravesites of Revolutionary War patriots—individuals who either fought or, in some way contributed to the war effort. The tour was created by Girl Scout Laura Capezio, of Cedar Grove, for her Gold Award. Cemetery superintendent Mary Jones hails the tour as possibly the first of its kind in the state.
A self-guided tour had been an idea for Jones and Bonnie Sharkey, the DAR Bloomfield Chapter regent. Jones said it had been on her mind for several years—she could do dozens of them with docents. But at the 2023 unveiling of the Revolutionary War Bloomfield Cemetery Monument, she realized what was needed was a self-guided tour.
This was realized when Laura’s troop leader and mother, Beth, applied for DAR entrance and spoke to Sharkey. It was mentioned that Laura had achieved her Silver Award and was looking for something to do for a gold. Sharkey asked if she might be interested in coming up with a self-guided cemetery tour. Laura, a member of Girl Scout Troop 20278 Cedar Grove, was interested and thought of using a QR code.
“The tour of the Revolutionary War patriots was the brainchild of Laura,” Sharkey said.
Requiring Girl Scout Heart of NJ council approval, Laura’s proposal had to address sustainability—that the finished project would be physically survivable.
Laura reasoned that “historical cemeteries, such as Bloomfield Cemetery, often lack modern technology, resulting in the loss of public access to interesting and important information. The main issue is the absence of QR walking tours for Revolutionary War gravesites, including those at Bloomfield Cemetery. This limitation restricts the public’s ability to explore the graves of the Patriots buried there and to learn their remarkable stories.”
Prior to the ceremony, Laura, who has been a Girl Scout for 13 years, said one of her favorite parts of the project was learning that many of the patriots’ families are connected by marriage.
“Everyone was connected,” she said. “They went to the same church or served in the same militia.”
There are 34 patriots buried in the cemetery. Although she researched all of them, the QR tour does not include every individual, but four families, with multiple patriots, and two individuals. The families are Baldwin, Dodd, Davis and Crane. The individuals are Aury King and Thomas Cadmus.
“The more I researched, the more they became individuals,” she said. “There were many different historical references to use, but it was still hard to find.
It was hard to make the people feel real.”
It is easy enough, she said, to find 500 articles on George Washington, but there may not be anything on a random soldier.
“It can be difficult to tell who did what, who married who or what they did after the war,” she said. “Thomas Cadmus had a lot, but for the wife of a soldier, there might not be a lot. By including a detail about the wife would humanize them.”
It was Cadmus who impressed Laura the most. His home, on the Washington Street of today, is still a private residence. It was there where “the father of our country” stayed when in the area.
“I didn’t know that someone buried in Bloomfield Cemetery knew George Washington,” Laura said
Once OK’ed, Laura’s Girl Scout proposal took over 18 months to come to fruition. A booklet of the tour, to be publicly available, cites 17 publications researched.
The cemetery tour will have seven QR posts for scanning. Six will be for the tour, one for the Revolutionary War Monument. At this one there will be an introduction of the tour and information about the cemetery and Laura who will be attending the Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice at the University of New Haven this fall to major in Forensic Science. She said she enjoyed watching crime stories on TV and learned a lot from them. All the bad stuff that happens to people, she said she would like to prevent.
The QR tour was made possible through small grants, cookie sales, assistance from members of VFW Post 493 of Nutley and Laura’s Girl Scout troop.
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