The Names and Families of Clan Maclean
Most surnames of British origin fall into six types:
- Occupations (e.g; Smith, Archer, Baker, Fisher)
- Personal Characteristics (e.g; Short, Brown, Whitehead)
- Geographical Features (e.g; Hill, Wood, Fields)
- Place Names (e.g; London, Hamilton, Sutton, Flint)
- For those descended from land-owners, the name of their holdings, manor or estate
- Patronymics and Ancestry, often from a male's given name (e.g; Richardson, Williams, Johnson) or from a clan name (for those of Scottish origin, e.g; MacDonald, Forbes)
It was not uncommon in the Highlands for members of a kindred to recognise a founding member or apical ancestor (common ancestor) and to claim "descent" from this person. In the case of the Macleans, this is Gillean of the BattleAxe, who may or may not have been a real person.
To complicate matters, not only were surnames a relatively recent invention for the Highlands, but also there was no standardisation of how names should be spelled. A partial reason for this is the fact that the Highlanders generally spoke Gaelic and/or Scots, and those keeping the records (usually for tax or legal reasons) generally spoke English. Although there is some crossover between Scots and English, they are different languages and both are very different to Gaelic. The result of this is that, when a name was recorded down it was often recorded in its phonic form (how it sounded) rather than how its owner would have spelled it.
It was common, therefore, for a Highlander to have various spellings of their surname - a Gaelic version, a Scots version, an English version, and phonic versions of each. And although most families did standardise the spelling of their surnames in the mid-late 18th century, real standardisation did not occur until the 19th century and particularly the 1841 Census, which listed people by name rather than simply enumerated those at a specific address. More...