Healy Family - Descendants

Descendants

Because of their mother's mixed ancestry, the Healy children were more than half European as well as partially African in ancestry. Much evidence exists that, with the social capital of their education and father's wealth, all of the Healy children were accepted into northern U.S. and Canadian society as "white" Irish Americans.

Martha and Michael, who married and had children, each chose European-American partners of Irish Catholic descent. Their religion had been integral to their lives and they wanted to ensure that future generations of their family would continue to be part of white Catholic society.

In 1865, Michael Healy married Mary Jane Roach, the daughter of Irish Catholic immigrants. They had one child, a son named Frederick Aloysius (1870–1912). According to James M. O'Toole, the historian who wrote about the family and the conundrum of race, Michael Healy

"...repeatedly referred to white settlers 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."

Frederick Healy worked as a newspaperman in San Francisco before becoming a partner in a business firm. On April 12, 1906, he married Edith Rutland Hemming of Colorado Springs, Colorado; they would have three sons. Edith Healy was a daughter of Colorado Springs banker Charles C. Hemming, who gave his name to Hemming Plaza in Jacksonville, Florida, his home town. A former Confederate soldier, Hemming placed a 62 foot (19 m) tall Confederate monument in the park in 1898.

Frederick Healy died of typhoid fever at his home in Santa Barbara, California, and is buried with his parents in Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, California.