Her husband was born in Medford, Massachusetts in 1889, studied at Tufts University, and co-founded the Raytheon Company in 1922 where he worked until 1950.
The family became deeply engaged in this work and returned to Africa on several expeditions throughout the 1950s and 1960s, each lasting from a few months to a year and a half.
It then fell to Lorna Marshall to conduct ethnographic interviews and compile fieldnotes, despite the fact that she had no formal anthropological training.
[3] During the 1960s and 1970s, Marshall published numerous articles on !Kung culture and religion.
In addition to written ethnography, Lorna Marshall also collaborated on several ethnographic films about the !Kung of Nyae Nyae with her son, John Kennedy Marshall (1932–2005), a documentary and ethnographic filmmaker.