had fled Saint-Domingue for the United States in the 1790s, during the Haitian Revolution. As interracial marriage was prohibited by Georgia's anti-miscegenation law, Michael formed a common-law marriage with the 16-year-old Eliza in 1829. While the Catholic Church did recognize interracial marriages, there were no priests in Macon County at that time to officiate. At the time, their marriage was unusual among interracial marriages in the South in that neither had ever married anyone else, and they lived with each other faithfully for the rest of their lives until both died in 1850. Patrick was the third of 10 siblings, eight of whom would survive into adulthood. His three sisters would go on to become nuns, including Eliza Healy, who became one of the first black mothers superior of a convent. Two of his brothers would become priests; one of them, James Augustine Healy, would become the Bishop of Portland, Maine, and the first Black Catholic bishop in the United States. Another brother, Michael, became a prominent captain in the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service in Alaska. Patrick and all of his siblings were born as slaves, as by the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, they inherited the legal status of their mother. Michael Healy was prevented by Georgia law from manumitting his wife or children, which could be done only by an act of the Georgia General Assembly in exceptional circumstances. Education As slaves under the law, the Healy children were prohibited from attending school. Wishing to remove them from their conditions of slavery in Georgia, Michael Healy sent all of his children to be educated in the North, and at the time of his death in August 1850, he intended to join them. Healy was at first unable to find a school in the North that would accept his children, but eventually found the Flushing Quaker Academy, associated with the Old Quaker Meeting House in Flushing, New York (now a neighborhood of Queens), which enrolled both Black and White students, including the three eldest Healy sons. Like three of his brothers, Patrick Healy continued his education at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. He graduated in 1850, at the age of 16, and was awarded a Bachelor of Arts by Georgetown University, as Holy Cross had not yet been chartered and conferred degrees under Georgetown's charter. Healy and his brothers had been taken under the tutelage