Marianne was born in Wilmington, Delaware and except for fourteen years in Peru as a Peace Corps volunteer (two years) and parent of three, she has spent most of her life in the area. She graduated from Ursuline Academy and the University of Delaware. She currently works for the State of Delaware.

Marianne has done a lot of checking into her Quinn family tree and currently has over 400 family members (direct and extended) in her Family Tree Maker computer program. She continues to try to make the leap over the pond to find the family roots in Ireland, but Patrick and Michael Quinn are very common names and eight pairs of siblings with those names came over from Ireland during the 1840s. She hopes one day to make that leap so that her brother will fulfill his promise to take her to Ireland to see the ancestral town.