From Wikipedia Gigi Parrish was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts as Katherine Gertrude McElroy, and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. Her mother died in 1918, and McElroy and her siblings were put up for adoption.

After adoption by a wealthy family, she and her step-siblings were tutored by author Dillwyn Parrish. Although he was eighteen years her senior, the two fell in love, and at the age of fifteen she married Parrish, under the name Gertrude McElroy. For their honeymoon, she and her husband started out on motorcycles from his family's home in Claymont, Delaware, intending to drive across the country to California.