Born in County Roscommon, Ireland, Michael Morris Healy traveled to Canada as a member of the British army.
[2] After his service, he migrated to Jones County, near Macon, Georgia, where he acquired a large amount of property and developed a cotton plantation.
[3] Due to the partus sequitur ventrem principle, Eliza and her siblings – James, Hugh, Patrick, Sherwood (Alexander), Michael, Martha, Josephine (Amanda) and Eugene – were legally considered slaves, as their mother was enslaved.
Their older brother Hugh risked his freedom to return to the South to rescue the three youngest Healy children, including Eliza.
Eliza and her two younger siblings, Josephine (Amanda) and Eugene, were baptized Catholic in New York in 1851, after their brother brought them from the South.
[6] Eliza and Josephine both attended schools operated by the Congregation of Notre Dame in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu and in Montreal, Quebec.
In the wake of the Panic of 1873, which destroyed much of James' financial resources, Eliza made the decision to enter religious life.
[6] Despite some racial discrimination in that era, the fact that she was a woman of color was not a hindrance to her admission by Mother Saint-Victor and her council, as she and her siblings were accepted as Irish-American Catholic.
[1] Though it is claimed she was the first African-American woman to be appointed a Mother superior,[5][7] she is predated by at least two such women, Servant of God Mary Elizabeth Lange of the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore, Maryland, and Venerable Mother Henriette DeLille of the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Over her fifteen years in leadership, Healy reorganized the school and its community, and restored a high level of academic and administrative excellence.
Her wisdom enabled her to unravel the complicated problems, to assure the resources, to pay the debts, and to make this ... mission one of our most prosperous houses in the United States".
Archives written by Mary Magdalen's community members described her as having business and organizational acumen, an optimistic disposition, and high expectations for the congregation.
... She reserved the heaviest tasks for herself ... in the kitchen, in the garden in the housework ... She listened to everyone ... was equal to everything ... spared herself nothing ... so that nothing was lacking to make the family (of the community) perfect.