by Paul Bass The New Haven independent
Sean Hardy’s closest relatives came to visit him in the hospital after he had surgery. He had so many close relatives that the hospital had to limit how many could see him.
More than 100 Hardy/Mills family relatives were ready to help Hardy through a rough moment in his life. The way he shows up for them.
Hardy, a New Haven educator, told the story Tuesday during a discussion on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” about an upcoming event he’s helping to organize: A Sept. 14 service and 40th anniversary get-together at St. Matthew UFWB Church on Dixwell Avenue for the Connecticut chapter of the Mills Family Reunion Committee.
Mills family descendants including Roland Mills (second bottom left); Arnold Mills (2nd top left); Arnold’s sister (Sean’s great aunt; (top left); Delphine Mills Adams (second from top right); David McClawhorn (Mills), with cigar; Kelly Mills (top right).
Hardy helped form that chapter 40 years ago as a teen. He and relatives brought together hundreds of New Haveners who descend from Roland (aka Rolin) Mills, a property owner born in 1828 in Greenville, Pitt County, N.C.
Mills and his descendants raised children in homes some of them still occupy at Haddocks Crossroads in Greenville.
Some of those descendants followed the migration north to factory jobs in New Haven in the 1940s and 1950s. They became one of the largest connected families in town, with well-known surnames like Mills and Hardy and Cox and Dawson and Moye.
The New Haven chapter organizes charter buses for the local descendants to travel every other year for a reunion in Greenville. They still visit Mills descendants living along the crossroads. “You go down to the corner store, and everybody is your cousin.” They gather at the homes for feasts of dishes like collard greens and macaroni and cheese. On the other years, they organize gatherings here in town, like the one on Sept. 14.
Hardy shares his genealogical research and photos at those gatherings. He began doing his own research long before websites like Ancestry.com helped hatch a grassroots movement of family tree creators.
On “Dateline,” Hardy described his own direct line to Roland Mills, who owned farmland along the crossroads. He was born a “free mulatto”; he married Caroline Brooks, who was born a slave, then lived on the Brooks family farm. One of their eight sons, Arnold, was Sean Hardy’s great-great grandfather. Also a farmer and landowner, he and his wife had enough money to deed land to the Pitt County school system for the construction of a school. Arnold’s son Kelly was Sean Hardy’s great grandfather. He started out farming in the Haddocks Crossroads community, where he helped found St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church with his cousins. One of Kelly and Henrietta Mills’ children was Sean Hardy’s grandmother Delphia Mills, who married a man named Noah Hardy, who besides farming served as a deacon and moderator at a Free Will Baptist Church.
Their son James Hardy grew up in Greenville, then came to New Haven, where he found work at G&O Manufacturing plus a second part-time job at the Hospital of St. Raphael. He came north with his wife Eradell (Carr) Hardy, who worked as a licensed beautician as well as at Grace New Haven Hospital, while earning a master’s in special education. They raised Sean and the rest of the family in the Eastern Circle development, then on Vernon Street in the Hill. (The family includes descendants of children Roland Mills had with a second partner, Ann Eliza Mills Corbett.)
As the world become more atomized, as people grew less likely to know their neighbors, let alone their cousins, the Mills descendants in New Haven remained family in the broadest sense.
“We really have a tight connection. When it’s good, when it’s not good, when we’re struggling, when we’re not struggling, we maintain and we try to keep together,” Hardy said.
That togetherness will be celebrated at the Sept. 14 gathering and service, which will be led by St. Matthews Senior Pastor Kevin Hardy — who, of course, traces his own lineage back to Roland Mills.
Click on the video below to watch the full discussion with Sean Hardy on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”
Sean Hardy with his cousin Pastor Kevin Hardy.
Members of the New Haven chapter of the Mills Family Reunion Committee.