Charlotte grew up without a father in Detroit in the sailor's ghetto in Manhattan. Her mother worked as a seamstress after her father, Hiram Black, disappeared in 1818 when Charlotte was only a year old.

Charlotte married at 16 and had seven children, the first just shy of her seventeenth birthday in 1834. She went on to have 8 more pregnancies, with six live births. Her first husband turned to drinking in 1840. He beat her, once, while in a drunken rage and threatened the children. He disappeared for a few days and the body was found later, in a Chicago ghetto, ripped apart. The police said he must've drunkenly wandered into rail tracks.

Her second husband gave her her last two full-term pregnancies, and was a good father to the children, even the oldest of which considered him a wonderful father instead of a step-father. The others did not truly remember their birth father, having been too young when he died.

Charlotte far outlived her peers and became a positively ancient woman by the standards of the time. She never knew why, but no sickness could keep her down for long, and she was quietly provided for in her later years by a check in the mail every month.