Rachel Lyon was born in Poland in 1781. She married Joseph Moses with whom she had six children. They lived in Charleston, where, after Joseph’s early death in 1814, Rachel became one of only a handful widows in the city to operate her own business—a shop owner, according to the 1819 city directory. Her oldest child, Catherine Moses, married Hertz Wolff Oppenheim, with whom Rachel was recorded as living in the 1850 census, more than thirty-five years after the death of her husband.