Healy Family - Family History

Family History

One of Healy's sons found through genealogical research that their father, Michael Morris Healy, was born on September 20, 1796, in the village of Athlone in County Roscommon. He emigrated to the United States, possibly by way of Canada, arriving in 1818. Through good fortune in a Georgia land lottery and later acquisitions, he eventually acquired 1,500 acres (6.1 km2) of good "bottomland" near the Ocmulgee River in Jones County, across from the market town of Macon. He became one of the more prominent and successful planters in an area known for cotton, and owned 49 slaves for his labor-intensive enterprise.

Among these was a 16-year-old girl named Mary Eliza (whose surname has been recorded both as Smith and Clark), whom he took as his common-law wife in 1829, when he was age 33. His wife, Mary Eliza Smith/Clark, has been described in various accounts as "slave" and "former slave", and as mulatto and African American (which covers mixed-race). Commonly in the South, persons of visible or known African racial heritage were considered to be black, because of the association with slavery as a racial caste. By that criterion, Mary Eliza and all the Healy children were black, although the children were three-quarters European or more in ancestry. The term "mulatto" was also in use, which recognized mixed race. In Louisiana, mulattoes formed a third class, known as Louisiana creoles; they gained education and property, sometimes as a result of settlements on women and children in the system of plaçage.

The union of Michael Morris and Mary Eliza Healy was unusual for being relatively formalized, although unions were common between white men and mixed-race or black women. He was not the only wealthy white man to take an African-American wife and to provide for the education of their children. For example, shortly before the start of the American Civil War, nearly all the 200 young men at Wilberforce College in southern Ohio, established by white and black Ohio Methodist leaders for the education of blacks, were mixed-race sons of wealthy white planters from the South.

At the time, Georgia law (and that of most other states) prohibited marriage between whites and blacks. The couple lived together as man and wife from 1829 until their deaths a few months apart in 1850. During that time they had ten children, nine of whom survived to adulthood.