Emily Esther Louisa Hart (née Bloomfield) was born 13 May 1863 in Stockwell in Surrey (now London), England, and was christened 16 July the same year in the Church of England at St. Barnabas Church in Kennington, Surrey. Her parents were George, a gardener born about 1844 in St. Leonards in Gloucestershire, and Esther Bloomfield (née Hayes; she was a native of Cranley, Surrey); they had married 15 July 1862 in Slinfold, Sussex.

 

In 1871, the family lived in Lambeth, London, and Emily had a sister, Alice Charlotte, then aged 3, and a brother, William Henry, an infant. Her sisters Minnie and Elizabeth Mary and her brother Henry were born later and lived with George and Esther Bloomfield at Stockwell Grove in Lambeth; her sister Kate Jane had died, aged one, in 1866.

 

In 1881, she may have been a housemaid in the family of George Simpson in Herne Hill, Lambeth.

 

On 28 November 1881, she married George Hossack Arthur Brook/e (b. 1853) in Lambeth, London. He was a clerk in 1881 and died in early 1890. It is possible she was the 'Emily Brooks' who in 1891 lived as a lodger at Willington Road in Lambeth, and who was a widow and listed as a club manageress.

 

She married Benjamin Hart in the West Ham district of Essex in the autumn of 1900.

 

In 1912, the family lived at Slinfold House, Whalebone Grove, Chadwell Heath, Essex.

 

She passed away on 7 September 1928 in Romford, Essex, aged 65. Her daughter, Eva, born in Ilford, also survived and was one of the longest-living survivors of the disaster.