Jimmy Hamilton seems to have been born in central Coatbridge. His mother was local, his father a miner cum steelworker from Eastwood in Renfrewshire, the family in 1911 living in miners' accommodation in Bargeddie. It was still there a decade later with the twenty-year old James for the moment also hewing coal. But football via Vales of Clyde would be his way out, at least until premature retirement and reversion to labouring. 

But just before hanging up his boots James had married. Still registering as a professional footballer and living in Barrow he married Mary Walker in 1930 in Glasgow, she a professional dancer. They would seem to have a son the following year in Holytown south on Coatbridge and then settle in Glasgow. Certainly Jimmy, on his death in 1972 at the age of seventy-one in Belvidere Hospital, which stood on the banks of the Clyde at the Cunigar Loop, was recorded as living in Carntyne, Mary outliving him by exactly a decade.