The third child and first-born son of Solomon Etting and his second wife, Rachel Gratz, Samuel grew up within a sprawling complex of siblings (like Kitty and Richea) half siblings (like Miriam) cousins, uncles and in-laws that accounted for nearly all of the leading Jewish figures in the Baltimore of his day.

When British forces attacked Baltimore in September 1814, eighteen-year-old Samuel was a member of the Committee of Vigilance and Safety and, along with other citizen soldiers, leapt to defend the city. He served among the Baltimore Fencibles in the defense of Fort McHenry, alongside brothers Mendes and Philip I. Cohen, and sustained several wounds in the process.

Samuel, like other members of the Etting family, was an ordinary trader. For a while he was a purchaser and sales agent for Robert Garrett of Baltimore, selling the firm’s whiskey in return for tea, spices, indigo and coffee. In 1828, at age 32, he married his second cousin, Ellen Hays (then 28), the fourth of nine children of Samuel Hays and Richea Gratz. As parents, Samuel and Ellen did not experience the joys of a large family like those in which they themselves had been raised. Their two small sons both died in infancy, and their daughter, Josephine, never married.

Though the Samuel family had played a leading role in Baltimore’s largely Ashkenazi Jewish community, he and Richea continued to maintain close ties to Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, preferring the traditional Sephardic rite with which they were personally familiar.  In 1857, Samuel joined with Solomon Nunes Carvalho and a few others to found the short-lived Baltimore Sephardic congregation Beth Israel, for which he served as the first—and only—president during its two-year existence.