These free mixed-race people gained education and property before the American Civil War, sometimes as a result of settlements on women and children in the system of plaçage.

But the Healy couple lived together as man and wife from 1829 until their deaths a few months apart in 1850, and they had intended to move to the free North with their youngest children.

Two of his sisters and their families had settled in New York City, but boarding schools there would not accept the mixed-race James, the oldest son.

Around 1844, the senior Michael Healy met John Bernard Fitzpatrick, the Catholic bishop of the Diocese of Boston.

[1] When the parents each died unexpectedly in 1850, their son Hugh Healy risked his freedom to return to Georgia from New York to take his three youngest siblings to the North.

Much evidence exists that, with the social capital of their education and father's wealth, the Healy children were accepted into northern U.S. and Canadian society as "white" Irish Americans.

They were mixed-race children of Mary Eliza Smith, a mulatto slave, and her common-law husband, Michael Morris Healy, an Irish Catholic immigrant from County Roscommon.

James, Patrick and Sherwood Healy all undertook graduate studies at the Saint-Sulpice Seminary in Paris, and the latter two earned doctorates there.

Their lives have intrigued historians, sociologists, and commentators because of the Healys' high achievements and their immigrant and ethnic complexity.

At a period of rapid growth in Catholic immigration, Healy oversaw the establishment of 60 new churches, 68 missions, 18 convents and 18 schools in the diocese.

Since the late 20th century, he has been considered the first American with African-American ancestry to serve as a Catholic bishop in the United States.

[11] In 1962, Holy Cross christened its newest dormitory as Healy Hall in his honor, for his achievements in developing the Catholic diocese in Maine.

At the age of 39, on July 31, 1874, he assumed the presidency of what was then the largest Catholic college in the United States, now the first known African American to do so.

[12] Patrick Healy's influence on Georgetown University was so far-reaching that he is often referred to as the school's "second founder," following Archbishop John Carroll.

After serving him as the local chancellor, he was appointed director of the Catholic seminary in Troy, New York, and later as rector of the cathedral in Boston.

Sherwood, like other pastors, generally deferred presiding over baptisms and marriages, leaving them and the usual honorariums to the junior clergy.

During the last two decades of the 19th century, Captain Healy was essentially the federal government's law enforcement presence in the vast territory.

[17] In his twenty years of service between San Francisco and Point Barrow, he acted as: judge, doctor, and policeman to Alaskan natives, merchant seamen and whaling crews.

[21] In 1903 Healy returned to the US when she was appointed school administrator and Mother Superior of a Catholic convent, Villa Barlow, in St. Albans, Vermont.

[21] In her last year, Sister Mary Magdalen served as Mother Superior for the Congregation of Notre Dame at the Academy of Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament on Staten Island, New York, where she restored their finances.

[1][22][23][24] All three of the Healy girls, Martha, Josephine, and Eliza, were educated from childhood at the convent school of the Congregation of Notre Dame in Montreal.

[1] According to James M. O'Toole, a historian who wrote about the family and the conundrum of race, Michael Healy ... repeatedly referred to white settlers [in Alaska] as "our people," and was able to pass this racial identity on to a subsequent generation.

His teenage son Fred, who accompanied his father on a voyage in 1883, scratched his name into a rock on a remote island above the Arctic Circle, proudly telling his diary that he was the first "white boy" to do so.

In February 2024, Washington Post writer Bryan Greene established through DNA evidence that the Healy siblings were blood relatives of abolitionist Ellen Craft, likely first cousins based on historical accounts.

In 1848, Craft escaped slavery in Macon, Georgia, not far from the Healys' birthplace, disguising herself as a white man traveling with her enslaved attendant, her actual husband.

James might arouse only vague suspicions about his background in the minds of those who met him for the first time, and Patrick was light-skinned enough that unknowing strangers would never guess that he had any "blood" in his veins other than that of white ancestors.

His skin was dark, his short hair had the tight kinks that common understanding identified with African Americans, and his face bore the nose and lips so frequently caricatured on the minstrel stage.