Emma Lucy Braun was born on April 19, 1889 in Cincinnati; she lived in Ohio for the remainder of her life. The daughter of George Frederick and Emma Moriah (Wright) Braun, her early interest in the natural world was encouraged by her parents, who took her and her older sister Annette Frances Braun into the woods to identify wildflowers. Braun's mother even had a small herbarium. In high school, Braun herself began collecting plants for study, the beginning of a huge personal herbarium that she assembled over her lifetime, composed of 11,891 specimens. Her collection is now a part of the herbarium at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C.