Oliver Hardy wounded at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862 and was a recruiting officer for Company K, 16th Georgia Regiment. The elder Oliver Hardy assisted his father in running the vestiges of the family cotton plantation following the Civil War. He then bought a share in a retail business and was elected full-time Tax Collector for Columbia County, Georgia. Hardy's mother Emily Norvell was the daughter of Thomas Benjamin Norvell and Mary Freeman, descended from Captain Hugh Norvell of Williamsburg, Virginia who arrived in Virginia before 1635. The elder Hardy and Norvell married March 12, 1890; it was her
Amory Nelson Hardy Amory Nelson Hardy Amory Nelson Hardy or A.N. Hardy (1835–1911) was a photographer in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 19th century. Portrait subjects included US president Chester A. Arthur, clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, politician James G. Blaine, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., writer Julia Ward Howe, labor activist Florence Kelley, suffragist Mary Livermore, philanthropist Isabella Somerset, and suffragist Frances Willard. He also made "electric-light portraits" of roller skaters in 1883. Hardy was born in Carmel, Maine, son of schoolteacher Benjamin Hardy. He married Angeline S. Davis in 1857 and had three children: