His father, James Palache, was born in New York and moved to San Francisco as a merchant.

[1] His memorial at the National Academy of Sciences reports: For political reasons he [John Palache] abandoned that home in 1834, and put his wife and three daughters on a ship sailing for New York, but he died before he could follow them on the next boat.

At the age of fifteen, James acted as cabin boy on a schooner rounding Cape Horn and in 1849 landed in San Francisco, his home henceforth.

[1] He mapped geologically the territory of the San Francisco Peninsula and from Berkeley and began to be interested in mineralogy.

In Heidelberg, he worked with mineralogists Harry Rosenbusch and Alfred Osann and crystallographer Victor Mordechai Goldschmidt.

At Harvard, Martin A. Peacock and Harry Berman (who introduced X-ray crystallographic methods) were important assistants.

[1] On August 15, 1899, Palache married Helen Markham, "who had traveled from her home in Green Bay, Wisconsin, to California in a caravan of seven covered wagons.

[3] His grandchildren included Judith Palache Gregory, editor of Catholic Worker and executor of the will of Dorothy Day.