Eliza Judah was born in London and in childhood moved to Montreal with her father, Abraham, and perhaps with her mother, whose name has been lost. In 1781, she married Abraham Chapman, a trader who had made his way up the St. Lawrence, through the Great Lakes region, becoming the first known Jewish settler in Detroit. In his will from 1783, he mentions that Eliza was expecting, however no further evidence of a child exists, and so it most likely died in childbirth or was miscarried. Abraham died that same year, and four years later Eliza remarried to Moses Myers, a merchant who, after some initial success smuggling goods into the colonies during the Revolutionary War, had suffered some major financial setbacks from which he had only just recovered.

The couple resettled in Norfolk, Virginia, where Moses enjoyed extraordinary success in imports and banking. In 1792, they moved into a huge brick townhouse in the Federal style. They raised their nine children there, including John, Samuel, and Myer, and there, too, Eliza gained a reputation as a delightful hostess, entertaining countless guests from Virginia society. The house, which today is a Norfolk landmark, housed the Myers family for five generations, until 1931.

The Crash of 1819 hit Moses hard financially. And greater tragedy lay around the corner. In 1821 and 1822, Moses and Eliza lost their two children, Abram and Hyam. Another son, Frederick, decided to take his grief-stricken mother to visit her family in Montreal with the hopes that it might soothe her. But tragedy struck once again on that trip, and Eliza died in Montreal in 1823.