Elkaleh, known to everyone as Joyce, was the fourth of seven children born to Judah and Jocohabed Mears. She grew up in New York, and her family attended Shearith Israel.

In 1767 she married Myer Myers, the most prominent silversmith in late colonial New York. Myer’s first wife, Joyce’s first cousin Elkaleh Myers-Cohen, with whom he’d had five children, had died less than two years before.

Joyce and Myer would have eight children, five of whom survived infancy. With the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, George Washington established his headquarters in New York, and the Myers family, like many New York families, fled the city as the British approached. The Myers family and several other families from Shearith Israel took refuge in Norwalk, Connecticut. When, in 1779, that town was burnt to the ground by the British, the Myers family again relocated, this time to Stratford, Connecticut, where they remained until the British ended its occupation of New York in 1783.

Myer struggled to reestablish himself as a silversmith and never managed to regain the prominence he had enjoyed before the war. After Myer’s death in 1795, much of the Myers family relocated to Richmond, Virginia. Half brothers Samuel and Moses Mears Myers went down first, establishing themselves in business. Richea, Joyce’s eldest daughter settled there with her husband Joseph Marx. Joyce followed too, living out the last decades of her life in the home of her son Moses. The Myers family enjoyed a swift rise to prominence in Richmond, establishing themselves in business, philanthropy and civic life. Samuel’s son Gustavus Adolphus would serve for thirty years on Richmond’s city council.