Plantation owner, Michael Morris Healy, and his bi-racial slave, Mary Eliza, had ten children during the1830s. The Healy family lived in Georgia where the law prohibited the education of slave and mixed-race children. The Healy children were sent north by their wealthy father to be free, white and to receive a Catholic education. The children were fair-skinned enough to be identified as white Irish-American and their mixed race ancestry was not widely known.  

Therefore, the eldest brother, James Augustine Healy, was able to become the first person with some African-American heritage to become a Roman Catholic priest and the first to become a Roman Catholic bishop in the United States.  

Patrick Francis Healy may be considered the first African-American to earn a doctorate, the first African-American to become a Jesuit priest, and the first to serve as president of a predominantly white college, now Georgetown University.

Sherwood Healy also became a priest and earned a doctorate. He became Director of the Seminary in Troy, New York, and Rector of the Cathedral in Boston.

All three of the Healy sisters became nuns. Eliza, Sister Mary Magdalen, advanced to become a mother superior of the Villa Barlow Academy and convent in St. Albans, Vermont.

According to author, James O'Toole, who wrote about the Healy family, it was not until the 1960s that the Healy’s mixed-race ancestry was widely known.