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Ross Jack

Scottish footballer (born 1959)

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 6, 2025
Entity authorityQ7369429
Source-derived summary

James Ross Jack (born 21 March 1959) is a Scottish football player and manager.

Playing career

A striker, Jack began his career with Ross County, where he played in the Highland Football League at the age of 14. He then joined Everton, initially as an apprentice before graduating to the professional ranks. He made only a solitary, goalscoring appearance, for Everton and, after a loan spell at Cardiff City, he joined Norwich City for £20,000 in December 1979. He would have to wait almost a year before making his Norwich debut against Ipswich Town in the League Cup in September 1980. In the 1981–82 season, he scored 10 league goals for Norwich and, with two in the FA Cup and two more in the Football League Cup, was the club's leading scorer for the season. In the summer of 1983, a fee of £15,000 secured his transfer to Lincoln City where he remained for the next two seasons. His last game for Lincoln, and in England, was in May 1985, against Bradford City, in a game overshadowed by the Bradford City stadium fire, which killed 56 spectators.

In July 1985, he returned to Scotland to join Dundee.

In October 1987, Dunfermline Athletic's manager Jim Leishman paid £15,000 to secure Jack's services and he made an instant impression, scoring on his debut in a 3–2 away defeat to Motherwell.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Ross Jack” is scottish footballer (born 1959). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Ross, Jack and Scottish, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1959, 1979, 1980, 1981—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1959-03-21. For this dossier, Ross, Jack and Scottish is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “scottish footballer (born 1959)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7369429. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1959, 1979, 1980 and 1981.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Ross Jack”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Ross Jack primary sources, Ross Jack archive and Ross research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Ross Jack”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Ross Jack” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.