Ira Jarvis was born in Saint Michael, Barbados (then British West Indies), on 26 September 1912. She was the only child of Anna Matilda Jarvis and George Fitz-Herbert Amory. At the age of nine, with ten dollars in her pocket, she was put on a ship and sent, alone, to live with her aunt in New York. There she acquired the skills to become a legal secretary, a career that lasted more than sixty years.

In New York, she got married and gave birth to her first child, Oliver. After World War II, she followed her husband to Germany where he was stationed, and where her second son, Herb, was born. After she and her husband separated she returned to New York, where her daughter Sandra was born.

At some point in her life, she moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she died on 12 January 2023.