Eliza Helen Williams (née Thompson) was the daughter of Martha Elizabeth Whitaker Cotten Thompson and was born in North Carolina on 22 April 1835. After her mother's death, she lived alongside her grandmother, Margaret Green Cotten, and then in the house of her aunt, Laura Placidia Clark Cotten. She was close friends with her cousin Margaret Eliza Cotten, and in April 1854 she married Joseph John Williams, a wealthy plantation owner in Tallahassee. She died in Tallahassee, Leon County, Florida on 9 January 1916.