Patrick Francis Healy - Children of The Healy Family

Children of The Healy Family

Three-quarters European in ancestry (as their mother was mixed race and their father Irish), and identifying as Irish-American Catholics, Patrick Francis Healy and his siblings were among many successful mixed-race Americans of the early 19th century who also acknowledged their African or "black" ancestry. But, according to James O'Toole, who wrote about all the Healy family, it was not until the 1960s that the Healys' mixed-race ancestry was widely known. Patrick F. Healy was then recognized as the first American of African ancestry to earn a PhD, to become a Jesuit priest, and to become president of a predominantly white college.

His brother James Augustine Healy became Bishop of Portland, Maine. His brother Michael A. Healy joined the United States Revenue Cutter Service, becoming a celebrated sea captain, the sole representative of the U.S. government in the vast reaches of Alaska. His brother Sherwood Healy also became a priest and earned a doctorate at Saint-Sulpice in Paris. He became director of the seminary in Troy, New York, and rector of the Cathedral in Boston.

Two 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, run by her order in Montreal, Canada. Martha married an Irish immigrant and had a son with him.

Aided by their father's wealth and their own educations, the Healy sons were accepted into U.S. Catholic society as Irish Americans. The daughters achieved education and status first in the Catholic Church in Canada, where people may have been less concerned about their mixed ancestry, especially given the many Catholic Métis in the Montreal area.

The Coast Guard Captain Michael Healy married an Irish Catholic woman and had a family with her. James M. O'Toole, his biographer, wrote about him:

He repeatedly referred to white settlers as "our people," and was even 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.