Frances Tobias, known as Fanny to her family and friends, was born in Liverpool, the second child and eldest daughter of Rebecca Levy and Tobias Tobias. She came to New York with her family in 1820, at age eleven. At seventeen, she became the bride of Uriah Hendricks, then twenty-four, a graduate of Columbia College and an employee of the Soho Copper Works established by his father, Harmon Hendricks and his uncle, Solomon Isaacs. This was the first in a series of marriages between the Tobias and Hendricks families; within short order, Fanny’s younger sister Harriet had joined the family as the wife of Uriah’s younger brother, Henry; then her brothers followed suit, with Henry and Isaac Alfred Tobias married to Uriah’s younger sisters Rosalie and Hermione, respectively.

The year of their marriage saw Fanny and her husband establish their household in Belleville, New Jersey, on the estate of the Soho Copper Works. There, Fanny gave birth to three daughters. Once her husband was made head of the firm, however, the family moved back to New York City. Over the course of the next two decades, Fanny would bear and raise fourteen more children, five sons and nine daughters, losing only one child in infancy. She would survive her husband by twelve years and died at age seventy-two.