His wife died soon after the family arrived in Australia, and the children were largely raised by their aunt Ellen Home, who lived with them.

[1] Jeanie Ross met her future husband Edmund Barton in April 1870, when he visited Newcastle with the Sydney University Cricket Club.

[10] She was the hostess of her husband's open-house meetings on the subject of federation, whose attendees included prominent federationists like Robert Garran, Atlee Hunt and Thomas Bavin.

[12] She did accompany her husband to the 1902 Colonial Conference in London, and attended the coronation of King Edward VII; she was tasked with presenting Queen Alexandra with a possum-fur carriage rug as a gift of New South Wales.

According to Geoffrey Bolton, "the daughter of a Newcastle publican and the son of an unsuccessful Sydney stockbroker found themselves moving easily in a closed society intolerant of the parvenu or the ill behaved".

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, "one of her last appearances in public life" was at a 1935 service in Centennial Park marking the silver jubilee of King George V. She died at her home in Darling Point on 23 March 1938, aged 86, and was buried alongside her husband at South Head General Cemetery.