However, by 1906 he had recovered and returned to Rugby Park, where he moved to left-back and very soon attracted attention, at the age of twenty-eight winning a first international cap followed by two more two seasons later. Meanwhile, by then he was already eight years married. In 1902 he had wed Dalry-born Catherine Wallace in their home village, he recorded as a boiler-maker's labourer. They were to have four surviving children all born in Kilmarnock, the last in 1916, by when in his mid-thirties he was still playing. In fact he would remain fit enough to feature in the Killy first-team until the beginning of 1919-20 and in the second-team that would take the Scottish Alliance title at that season's end

By then Jamie Mitchell was forty, at which point he stepped back to work as a plasterer's labourer and then painter/repairer of railway wagons and it was as such in retirement that in 1958 he died at the age of seventy-eight, by then a widower. Catherine, whilst registered as staying in Kilmarnock, had predeceased him by fully sixteen years, passing away aged sixty of a heart attack but back in Crosshouse, indeed at its Manse.