The Rosses, Nick and Jimmy, were the sons of parents from the North, his mother from Findhorn in Moray and his mason father from Cromarty on the Black Isle. They had met and married late in Edinburgh, with their seven children brought up in some poverty and with repercussions. Both the first-born would die in infancy, followed in 1874 by the death of their father, when Nick was twelve, Jimmy just eight, which was then reinforced by the untimely deaths of his footballing boys at just thirty-one and thirty-six respectively and of the scourge of the Scots poor, TB. 

Nick Ross would once at Deepdale, officially still as a slater, soon be made captain. He would also be converted from centre-forward to left-back. In fact a team would be more or less built around that would in 1887 reach the semi-final of the FA Cup. But at that point he was on his way to Everton where at £10 per week he became the game's best paid exponent, earning enough for him, his wife and their expected child to live very comfortably. In 1884 he had returned to Edinburgh to marry Margaret Gowans, with whom he was to have a least two children, a daughter born in Preston in 1888 and a son in Edinburgh in 1891.