But the move was made with him, having started as a centre-forward, now a centre-half. At least that was the position he played as in 1891 the Tynecastle team won the Cup and the one that he took on when, after the Cup win, Nottingham Forest, then in the Football Alliance, are said to have come in for him. In fact he may have joined Forest as early as October 1888, had been loaned back to be recalled briefly in 1891-2 but making only six appearances, returned on loan and then only in 1892-3 with twenty-three starts really finding a place in the Nottingham club's first-team squad.  

And finally there he would stay for the next nine years, including as captain a win in the 1898 FA Cup Final. But he did it as a married man. In 1885, recorded as a Tinder Works Labourer, he had in Motherwell wed Jeanie Woods and they were to have six children, three born in Scotland and three in Nottingham, the first of the latter in 1892. However, John's time at Forest would come to an end in 1901 three years after the Cup win. The previous season he had managed just eleven starts, down from thirty odd, and he had actually just passed his thirty-eighth birthday, although Forest record him as just thirty-four. And whilst he returned to Motherwell it would be only for a swan-song. 

At thirty-nine he was finally to hang up his boots, remaining in his home-town. But it was to be only temporary. In 1910 he aged fifty seven, Jeanie two years younger, a decision was taken to emigrate to Canada initially to Regina in Saskatchewan, he there finding work as a engineer. However and presumably still in Regina, it seems Jeanie McPherson would in 1918 pass away at the age of sixty-three, with John remaining there until 1951, when he would move to Victoria in British Columbia. And it would there in 1957 at ninety-four that he would die in hospital to be cremated still in the city at the Royal Oak Crematorium.