The daughter of Solomon and Rebecca Eve Hendricks Levy, Augusta Levy was born in 1801 in New York. In 1835, in Philadelphia, she married Lewis Feuchtwanger, an immigrant from Bavaria. Together they had five children.

Lewis was a mineralogist, metallurgist, and chemist, who had received a doctorate from the University of Jena in 1827 and came to America two years later. He opened the first German pharmacy in New York and practiced medicine, especially during the 1832 cholera epidemic. Feuchtwanger wrote several important works including Popular Treatise on Gems in 1838 and Elements of Mineralogy in 1839. He manufactured and traded in rare chemicals and metals, and in 1829 introduced in the United States the alloy of copper and nickel called German silver, calling the attention of the government to the possibility of nickel for small coins. During the Panic of 1837, with people hording vast numbers of coins, Feuchtwanger issued from his pharmacy thousands of one-cent pieces made of German silver, now known as the Feuchtwanger Cent. This, of course, was before legislation banning private coinage.