Miriam Etting was the second of Solomon and Reyna Simon Etting’s children to survive infancy. At three her mother died, and the following year her father remarried to Rachel Gratz Etting. The family then left Lancaster, Pennsylvania—the city of Miriam’s birth—for Baltimore, where Solomon’s mother, Shinah Solomon Etting, had settled more than a decade earlier. She would, over the course of the next twelve years, gain seven half siblings from her father’s new union, including Richea Gratz and Kitty.
At nineteen she married Jacob Myers of Georgetown, South Carolina, where the Myers family had settled in the mid-18th century. Georgetown, unlike Charleston, had a rather small Jewish presence, though it was the second oldest community in the state. Jacob is recorded in the Georgetown Gazette in 1800 as captain of the Winyah Artillery Company, a local militia. He also served as a member of the Library Society, “for the gradual establishment of a library inn Georgetown.”
A mere two years after she was married, Miriam, aged twenty-one, died from complications giving birth to their second child, echoing her own mother’s tragically early death.
