• daughter of John.1506, p 1

• The mysterious baby Mary is now 19 in 1870 and is listed in William and Lucy Maria’s household in Saginaw, just 10 or 12 households away from the Gardners. She is listed after all the other children, so she is clearly not a member of the immediate family.1495, p 2

• But for a time she lived on the Stanford campus and ran a sort of dining hall in her home there for students. She also had an adopted daughter who was the first Japanese woman to attend Stanford.2727

• She went to Japan with him, but returned to America without him in 1890 and settled in Palo Alto, CA. In 1893 she adopted the three-year-old orphaned daughter of a Japanese couple whose names are not known. Mary named the girl Minnie Ruth. Eventually Minnie graduated from Stanford and married a Japanese national named Kiyosue Inui, who became a Japanese foreign service officer. He and Minnie lived in several foreign countries. In Palo Alto, Mary used the name Kimura until Minnie married, and after that she was known as Mary Gallagher. She operated a series of small businesses in Palo Alto.1500, p 8

• In the 1890s, Mary went with her father to Ann Arbor..he needed to see doctors there, I think. They may have stayed at Hannah Neal’s home and there Mary met Jun Kimura, a U of M medical student from Japan who boarded there. They married (the newspaper headline at Mary’s hometown was “Mary marries a Jap”.) When he finished school they both went to Japan but his parents did not approve of Mary..they had a bride picked out for him. I don’t know if they divorced or whether the marriage was not considered valid, but Mary and Jun split. Mary stayed in Japan for a few years and taught at a school, but she finally returned to the States and went to Palo Alto (why there?). As I mentioned in another letter to you, she ran a dining place in her home on the Stanford campus but later moved into Palo Alto and ran a rooming house for students. Sometime in there, she adopted a Japanese little girl whose parents had died, up in the Sierras. The father was working on a railroad. This girl, Minnie, was the first Japanese woman to graduate from Stanford. She later married (Minnie) a Japanese man and they had a daughter, Londa. When the US went to war with Japan, Londa was about 20 and was going to school in SF. Her parents had been in Japan and were on their way back, via boat, when Pearl Harbor happened. The boat was turned around and Minnie and her husband remained in Japan for the rest of the war. Meanwhile, her government was rounding up the Japanese and putting them into camps. A priest in SF who was a friend of Londa’s wanted to spare her this. Londa had already approached an aunt and uncle (Edward Detler Gallagher and his Myrtle) in SF, and they would not take her in. So the priest found a woman from his church who took her in. Londa spent the war there, in SF, dressed as a Chinese woman.
Meanwhile, back in Michigan as my mom was growing up, they would hear little bits and pieces of this story...no details...mostly what they knew was that there was a Londa. Years later we moved here [Palo Alto] (in 1957) and my mother was having tea with friends one day and mentioned this story...and one of the women at the table gasped. She was the woman who had taken in Londa! Calls were made and my mom met Londa (Minnie had JUST died!). My mom has been working on this story, trying to find out more about Kimura. I will see if she has anything written up.2728

• It had not been too many ears since Mary Gallagher had settled in Palo Alto to begin a new life — to forget her tragic marriage to a young Japanese medical student whom she had met when attending college back East.2729, p 184

• What a gentle and forgiving nature, to accept a Japanese child as her own, to love Japan, in spite of her experience.
In order to earn a living, Grandma Gallagher had a boarding house and served lunch to the faculty of Stanford University, using part-time student help. In those days Palo Alto was a small college community and everyone knew everyone else, so that soon “Mary’s Place” became quite popular.2729, p 184

• I did have their daughter May/Mary (aged 4/12 on 24 Aug 1850 - census).1631