Have just found this site and also seemingly new distant relatives. And it is good to find the 1750s Kenneth Mclean. His son, also Kenneth Mclean (born 1793 in Loftus) was my g.g.g.grandfather. He is listed as first a clerk and later overseer and then retired manager to the alum works in Loftus. The works I think closed around 1863. Two of Kenneth (jnr)'s sons, George (my g.g.grandfather) and John were flour millers at Spite Mill (now a house) in Osmotherley. George married Barbara / Barbra Taylor from Dalton on Tees. He died around 1863 and just before the birth of his 4th son, George (born 1864), according to my grandmother, of a respiratory illness related to milling. Did the two sons of Kenneth jnr complete apprenticeships, I ask myself, at the alum works before transferring their skills to grain? George's widow, Barbara, then moved to Stockton where she ran a grocery business. She died in 1898. My great grandfather, another George, is listed as a youth in the census as a millwright, but he is later mentioned as a joiner and worked as a pattern maker at the foundary in Middleton St George. John Mclean, born 1859 and son of Barbara Taylor and George Mclean apparently was a farmer in Dalton. Did he inherit Barbara Taylor's family farm?
My grandma (died in mid 1980s) had several stories about the Mcleans 'way back'; that they came originally from the Inverness, that they had something to do with the Argyll estates (tho' I have no proof of this). Also that the Taylors (as in Barbara) were apparently associated with the Whitby jet trade (tho' again I have no evidence). I (and my mother) would love to catch up your research so that we can fill in the holes in ours. Interestingly, just back from visiting my mother's cousin near Thirsk who is the grandaugher of George Mclean the pattern maker in Middleton St George. She has the family name of Barbara, her father was called Wm Kenneth and her brother Kenneth!