Israel Solomons was born in Charleston in 1847, the son of Abraham Alexander Solomons, Savannah’s leading druggist, and Cecilia Moses, the daughter of Isaiah and Rebecca Phillips Moses. He was their fourth child, but the first to survive infancy. This surely exacerbated the tragedy of his childhood death, a “loving, charming, beautiful boy of seven.” He died at Cecilia’s parents’ home in Charleston during a yellow fever epidemic. “Those were the days of slow boat travel,” recalled his sister Rebecca Ellen Solomons Alexander, “and only by boat from Savannah to Charleston. My father reached his boy, who he idolized, to find him dead! In all my life I never heard my father call his name and my mother said that even to her he could not speak of his loss which would have comforted her very much.”